Ex-Google Engineer Convicted for Stealing 2,000 AI Trade Secrets for China Startup
A former Google engineer accused of stealing thousands of the company’s confidential documents to build a startup in China has been convicted in the U.S., the Department of Justice (DoJ) announced Thursday. Linwei Ding (aka Leon Ding), 38, was convicted by a federal jury on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets for taking over 2,000 documents containing the tech giant’s trade secrets related to artificial intelligence (AI) technology for the benefit of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
The theft took place between May 2022 and April 2023. Ding, who joined Google in 2019, affiliated himself with two tech companies based in China, including a startup named Shanghai Zhisuan Technologies Co., which he founded in 2023, while he was employed by the firm. Ding downloaded the documents to his computer in December 2023, less than two weeks before resigning from Google.
Ding was indicted in March 2024 for transferring sensitive proprietary information from Google’s network to his personal Google Cloud account. The stolen documents included details about the company’s supercomputing data center infrastructure used for running AI models, the Cluster Management System (CMS) software for managing the data centers, and the AI models and applications they supported.
In February 2025, Ding was charged with economic espionage. The superseding indictment also claimed he applied to a Shanghai-based ‘talent’ program sponsored by Beijing. He faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison for each count of theft of trade secrets and 15 years for each economic espionage count.
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