Former Google Engineer Convicted of AI Trade Secrets Theft

A federal jury in San Francisco convicted former Google software engineer Linwei Ding on Thursday of stealing artificial intelligence trade secrets to benefit Chinese companies, marking the first major criminal case involving AI-related economic espionage to reach a guilty verdict.

Ding, a 38-year-old Chinese national also known as Leon Ding, was found guilty on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets following an 11-day trial in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The charges stem from actions Ding took while employed at Google from May 2022 to April 2023, during which he accessed and removed more than 2,000 pages of confidential information from the company's internal network.

Prosecutors presented evidence that Ding copied sensitive data, including designs for Google's Tensor Processing Unit chips, graphics processing unit systems, and custom SmartNIC hardware and software used for high-speed networking in AI data centers. The materials also covered software for coordinating large-scale GPU clusters and managing tasks in environments that train advanced AI models. This technology supports Google's competitive...