Ex-Google engineer found guilty of stealing AI secrets

A federal jury in California convicted former Google software engineer Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets tied to AI technology.

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

What happened?

According to court records, Ding accessed and removed more than 2,000 pages of confidential information from Google systems between May 2022 and April 2023 while employed as a software engineer. Prosecutors said the material was uploaded to Ding’s personal Google Cloud account. In December 2023, shortly before his resignation, Ding downloaded the data to a personal computer.

Evidence at trial also showed that Ding maintained relationships with two technology companies based in the People’s Republic of China during his employment.

Trade secrets tied to Google’s AI supercomputing infrastructure

Jurors found that the stolen information related to hardware and software used in Google’s AI supercomputing data centers. The material included detailed designs for Tensor Processing Unit chips, graphics processing unit systems, and software used to manage communication and task execution across large scale computing environments.

Additional information covered software used to coordinate thousands of chips into systems capable of training and running large AI models. The trade secrets also involved Google’s custom SmartNIC technology, which supports high speed networking inside AI infrastructure and cloud services.

“This conviction reinforces the FBI’s steadfast commitment to protecting American innovation and national security. The theft and misuse of advanced AI technology for the benefit of the People’s Republic of China threatens our technological edge and economic competitiveness,” noted FBI Special Agent in Charge Sanjay Virmani.