Former Google engineer found guilty of espionage and theft of AI tech

A federal jury in San Francisco on Thursday convicted a former Google software engineer of stealing trade secrets related to the search company’s AI technology.

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 related to stealing thousands of pages of confidential information from Google to benefit the People’s Republic of China, according to court documents. 

“In today’s high-stakes race to dominate the field of artificial intelligence, Linwei Ding betrayed both the U.S. and his employer by stealing trade secrets about Google’s AI technology on behalf of China’s government,” said Roman Rozhavsky, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division, in a statement Friday. “Today’s verdict affirms that federal law will be enforced to protect our nation’s most valuable technologies and hold those who steal them accountable.”

The case marks the first conviction on AI-related economic espionage charges in the U.S., according to the Department of Justice.

Google executives and U.S. leaders have been vocal about the AI arms race, particularly between the U.S. and China. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis recently told CNBC that Chinese AI models might be “a matter of months” behind U.S. and Western capabilities.

The jury’s decision comes after Ding was originally indicted in 2024. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria for the Northern District of California oversaw the 11-day trial that led to Thursday’s decision.

Between May 2022 and April 2023, Ding stole more than 2,000 pages of Google’s AI trade secrets and uploaded them to his personal Google Cloud account, the DOJ said Friday. At the time, Ding had been affiliated with two tech companies based in China and was in the process of creating his own tech company.

The trade secrets contained detailed information about the architecture of Google’s custom Tensor Processing Unit chips and the company’s graphics processing unit systems, according to the DOJ. The trade secrets also included details about Google’s custom-built SmartNIC, a specialized network interface card that enables high-speed communication across its AI supercomputers and cloud networking systems.

Ding’s attorney Grant Fondo reportedly argued that Google didn’t do enough to protect the information. He argued that the documents in question were available to thousands of employees and therefore could not have contained trade secrets, adding “Google chose openness over security,” according to Courthouse News Service.

Ding, whose next court date is Tuesday, faces a potential maximum sentence of 10 years in prison for each count of theft of trade secrets and 15 years in prison for each count of economic espionage, according to the DOJ.

“We’re grateful to the jury for making sure justice was served today, sending a clear message that stealing trade secrets has serious consequences,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google vice president of regulatory affairs, said in a statement to CNBC.

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