Ex-Google Worker Guilty of Stealing AI Tech for Chinese Firm (3)

A former Google engineer was convicted Thursday of economic espionage and trade secrets theft for taking hundreds of the company’s confidential documents on AI chip technology to build a startup in China.

A 12-person jury in San Francisco federal court after three hours of deliberation unanimously found Linwei Ding guilty on all seven counts of trade secrets theft and all seven counts of economic espionage for benefiting the Chinese government.

The verdict caps off a two-and-a-half week criminal trial in the US District Court for the Northern District of California where federal prosecutors claimed that Ding, a Chinese national first hired by Google in 2019, copied thousands of internal Google documents onto his Apple Notes App and uploaded them as PDFs to his personal computer.

Ding declined to after the verdict was read. His attorney, Grant Fondo of Goodwin Procter LLP, said he respects the jury’s verdict but disagreed with the outcome.

“The jury delivered a clear message today that the theft of this valuable technology will not go unpunished,” Craig Missakian, US Attorney for the Northern District of California, said in a press statement. “We will vigorously protect American intellectual capital from foreign interests that seek to gain an unfair competitive advantage while putting our national security at risk.”

Google’s Vice President of Regulatory Affairs Lee-Anne Mulholland said in a statement that the company is “grateful to the jury for making sure justice was served.”

Judge Vince Chhabria after the verdict said that Ding, 38, was not a flight risk and ruled that he could remain out of custody until sentencing. Ding faces up to 10 years in prison for each trade secrets count and 15 years for each economic espionage count.

The government said 105 of the documents Ding stole were confidential trade secrets covering technical details how Google designs, builds, and organizes specialized chips, called Tensor Processing Units and Graphical Processing Units, to create supercomputers that train large language AI models.

Beginning in May 2022, while still an employee at Google, Ding began looking for other job opportunities in China. That year, he founded an AI firm in China called Shanghai Zhisuan Technologies Co. and told investors that the startup could replicate Google’s AI supercomputing technology and that he was one of 10 people in the world who could do so.

His stealing of the documents allowed him to “skip huge parts of the design process” for an AI supercomputer and undercut a decade of work by Google and millions of dollars in investments, prosecutors alleged.

“The defendant wanted more from himself than what his knowledge and experience could get him, so he stole, cheated, and lied,” Assistant US Attorney Molly Priedeman told the jury during closing arguments.

Prosecutors alleged that he engaged in a number of deceitful tactics to cover his tracks, including lying to an investigator whether he had Google documents on his personal computer and asking one of his former interns to swipe his badge at Google’s offices while he was in China working on his startup.

His scheme unraveled in late 2023 when Google locked him out of the company network after learning that he gave a public presentation in China to potential investors his startup.

Ding’s defense hinged in large part on arguments that the documents he took don’t meet the legal definition of a trade secret, which require Google to take reasonable measures to protect the secret. Many of the documents he copied could be accessed by over 160,000 Google employees and contractors and the company had an incoherent confidentiality labeling system, his attorneys said.

They also argued that prosecutors failed to show he had any intent to use the documents to benefit his company or China. The government was asking the jury to “speculate” what he would have done with the trade secrets.

“He never used them, he never transferred them, he never tried to sell them,” Fondo told the jury during closing arguments.

The case is USA v. Ding, N.D. Cal., No. 3:24-cr-00141, 1/29/26.

To the reporter on this story: Isaiah Poritz in San Francisco at iporitz@bloombergindustry.com

To the editors responsible for this story: Stephanie Gleason at sgleason@bloombergindustry.com ; Patrick L. Gregory at [email protected]

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