Ex-Google engineer found guilty of stealing AI secrets to benefit China

Google

• Ex-Google engineer convicted of stealing AI trade secrets for China
• First US conviction for AI-related economic espionage
• Ding faces up to 15 years per count of economic espionage

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A federal jury in San Francisco on Thursday convicted a former Google software engineer of stealing trade secrets related to the company’s artificial intelligence technology, marking a legal first in the US for AI-related economic espionage.

The jury found 38-year-old Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, guilty on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets. Prosecutors said Ding stole thousands of pages of confidential Google documents to benefit the People’s Republic of China.

According to court filings, Ding copied more than 2,000 pages of sensitive AI material between May 2022 and April 2023 and uploaded them to his personal Google Cloud account. At the time, he was affiliated with two China-based technology companies and was in the process of launching his own startup.

The stolen documents included detailed technical information about Google’s AI infrastructure, including the architecture of its custom Tensor Processing Unit chips, graphics processing unit systems, and SmartNIC technology used in high-speed AI supercomputing and cloud networking.

“This verdict affirms that federal law will be enforced to protect our nation’s most valuable technologies,” Roman Rozhavsky, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division, said in a statement. He added that Ding had betrayed both Google and the United States during what he described as a high-stakes global race to dominate artificial intelligence.

The Department of Justice said the case represents the first conviction in the US involving economic espionage charges tied specifically to AI technologies.

The verdict comes amid heightened scrutiny of the AI rivalry between the US and China. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis recently said that Chinese AI models could be only months behind Western systems, underscoring concerns about intellectual property theft and national security.

Ding was originally indicted in 2024. The 11-day trial was overseen by US District Judge Vince Chhabria of the Northern District of California.

Ding’s defence argued that Google failed to adequately protect the information, claiming the documents were accessible to thousands of employees and therefore did not qualify as trade secrets. Prosecutors rejected that argument, saying the information was clearly marked confidential and tightly controlled.

Ding now faces a potential maximum sentence of up to 10 years in prison for each count of trade secret theft and up to 15 years for each count of economic espionage. His next court hearing is scheduled for Tuesday.

Google welcomed the verdict. “We’re grateful to the jury for making sure justice was served today,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, said in a statement, adding that the ruling sends a strong message about the consequences of stealing trade secrets.