Ex-Google engineer convicted of stealing AI secrets for Chinese companies

WILMINGTON, Delaware – Former Google software engineer Ding Linwei was convicted by a federal jury in San Francisco on Jan 29 of stealing artificial intelligence (AI) trade secrets from the US tech giant to benefit two Chinese companies he was secretly working for, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) said.

Ding, a 38-year-old Chinese national, was found guilty after an 11-day trial of seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets for stealing thousands of pages of confidential information.

Each economic espionage charge carries a maximum 15-year prison term and a US$5 million (S$6.3 million) fine, while each trade secrets charge carries a maximum 10-year term and a US$250,000 fine.

Ding, who is also known as Leon Ding, is scheduled to appear at a status conference on Feb 3, according to the DOJ.

An attorney for Ding did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ding was originally indicted in March 2024 on four counts of theft of trade secrets. A superseding indictment in February expanded the charges.

His case was coordinated through an inter-agency Disruptive Technology Strike Force, created in 2023 by the Biden administration.

Prosecutors said Ding stole information about the hardware infrastructure and software platform that allows Google’s supercomputing data centres train large AI models.

Some of the allegedly stolen chip blueprints were meant to give Google, which is owned by Alphabet, an edge over cloud computing rivals Amazon.com and Microsoft, which design their own, and reduce Google’s reliance on chips from Nvidia.

Prosecutors said Ding joined Google in May 2019 and began his thefts three years later, when he was being courted to join an early-stage Chinese technology company.

Google was not charged and has said it cooperated with law enforcement. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. REUTERS