Sales Director Consulted with DeepSeek, Lost Job and 5 Million Rubles
Babuskinsky District Court of Moscow upheld the lawful dismissal of Ekaterina Remizova, sales director at GK Energoprof, for disclosing trade secrets. The employee was found to have forwarded company documents, including tender participation details and colleagues' salary data, to her personal email. Furthermore, she uploaded confidential reports with sales statistics, financial metrics, and cash flow data from the company's internal PowerBI resources into the external AI service DeepSeek.
The court ruled that uploading such protected information into the DeepSeek AI system itself constitutes disclosure. An additional ground for dismissal was her disclosure of strategic company plans to a supplier, after which the counterparty ceased communication. The employer also cited systematic failure to meet sales targets.
Following her dismissal, Remizova sued, demanding the termination be declared illegal, changed to "by mutual agreement," and seeking a contractual "golden parachute" of 5 million rubles. The court rejected the 5 million ruble claim, as such payment was only stipulated for mutual agreement or redundancy. While one disciplinary penalty was deemed unjustified, ordering the company to pay 10,000 rubles in moral compensation, the court largely sided with the employer, refusing to recognize the dismissal as unlawful.
The case highlights risks associated with using external AI services. A security expert noted that DeepSeek's "Share" function creates links that can be indexed by search engines like Google, potentially turning temporary shares into permanent, publicly accessible digital traces containing corporate data.
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