Ex-Google Engineer Guilty of Swiping AI Trade Secrets for China
A federal jury in San Francisco has convicted a former Google software engineer of economic espionage and theft of trade secrets in a landmark case involving artificial intelligence technology.
Linwei Ding, 38, also known as Leon Ding, was found guilty on Thursday on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets related to stealing confidential AI information from Google. According to evidence presented during the 11-day trial, Ding stole more than 2,000 pages of confidential documents containing Google’s AI trade secrets between May 2022 and April 2023, uploading them to his personal Google Cloud account.
The stolen information included details about Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), and SmartNIC network interface cards—critical infrastructure that powers Google’s AI workloads and gives the company a competitive advantage over rivals like Amazon and Microsoft. Prosecutors alleged that Ding, who was hired by Google in 2019 to develop software for the company’s supercomputing data centers, secretly affiliated himself with two China-based technology companies while employed at Google.
“This conviction exposes a calculated breach of trust involving some of the most advanced AI technology in the world at a critical moment in AI development,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg. The FBI emphasized that the case demonstrates federal law enforcement’s commitment to protecting American technological innovation from foreign espionage.
Ding faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison for each count of theft of trade secrets and 15 years for each count of economic espionage. His next court appearance is scheduled for February 3, 2026.
Source: Justice.gov