A former software engineer at Google has been convicted of stealing artificial intelligence trade secrets to benefit Chinese companies, U.S. authorities said on Thursday. Linwei Ding, a 38-year-old Chinese national also known as Leon Ding, was found guilty by a federal jury in San Francisco following an 11-day trial.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Ding was convicted on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets after stealing thousands of pages of confidential information from Google. Prosecutors said the stolen material related to hardware infrastructure and software platforms used by Google’s supercomputing data centers to train large AI models.
Each economic espionage charge carries a potential sentence of up to 15 years in prison and a $5 million fine, while each trade secrets charge carries a maximum of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Ding is scheduled to appear at a status conference on February 3.
Authorities said Ding began stealing information while secretly working with two Chinese technology companies. Some of the alleged trade secrets involved chip designs intended to give Google an advantage over cloud rivals and reduce reliance on third-party chip suppliers. The case was coordinated through a U.S. interagency task force focused on protecting sensitive technologies. Google was not charged and has said it cooperated with law enforcement.
