Former Google software engineer convicted of AI espionage, trade secret theft

A federal jury in San Francisco found a former Google software engineer guilty of espionage and theft of trade secrets in the first-ever espionage conviction related to AI.

Following an 11-day trial, the jury on Thursday found Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, guilty on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets – including thousands of pages of Google trade secrets that were stolen to help China.

“In today’s high-stakes race to dominate the field of artificial intelligence, Linwei Ding betrayed both the US and his employer by stealing trade secrets about Google’s AI technology on behalf of China’s government,” Roman Rozhavsky, assistant director of the FBI’s espionage unit, said in a Friday statement.

A federal jury in San Francisco Thursday found a former Google software engineer guilty of espionage and theft of trade secrets. REUTERS

US tech firms have been in a fierce race to deliver the most advanced AI models – especially after China’s DeepSeek shocked markets in January 2025 with the release of AI chips developed at just a fraction of the cost of US rivals.

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis recently warned that China’s AI models might be just “a matter of months” behind American counterparts.

From May 2022 through April 2023, Ding, 38, stole more than two thousand pages of confidential company information containing Google’s AI secrets and uploaded them to his personal Google Cloud account, the Justice Department said Friday.

Ding – who was indicted in March 2024 – also secretly affiliated himself with two Chinese tech firms while he was working at Google, according to the DOJ.

He was in talks to serve as a chief technology officer for a tech firm based in China, and in the process of founding his own China-based startup.

The jury found Leon Ding, 38, guilty on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets. Linkedin

In multiple statements to potential investors, Ding claimed he could build an AI supercomputer using the trade secrets he stole from Google, according to the Justice Department.

In December 2023, less than two weeks before he left the tech giant, he downloaded the stolen documents onto his personal computer, according to court documents.

The stolen docs contained detailed information about Google’s Tensor Processing Unit chips and its custom-built SmartNIC, a network interface card – information that could be used to train large AI models, the DOJ said.

This case of espionage and theft involved “some of the most advanced AI technology in the world at a critical moment in AI development,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg.

Ding faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison for each count of theft and 15 years in prison for each count of economic espionage. 

His attorney Grant Fondo argued that the documents could not have contained valuable trade secrets because Google did not do enough to protect the information.

“Google chose openness over security,” Fondo told the jury in closing arguments, according to Courthouse News Service. “They did not take reasonable measures.”