Another commenter suggested that ByteDance was downplaying the damage. That commenter claimed that the intern used "malicious code" to "deliberately sabotage the training for several months" and suggested that the intern could face steeper penalties if ByteDance wanted to claim damages.

ByteDance says the now-dismissed intern 'maliciously interfered' with AI training and denies claims that 8,000 GPUs were involved.

TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance fired an intern for allegedly sabotaging a training session about artificial intelligence. ByteDance confirmed the worker was canned in August after having “maliciously interfered” on a research project to train AI models.