Former Google engineer convicted of stealing AI secrets for Chinese companies

Former Google GOOGL.O software engineer Linwei Ding was convicted by a federal jury in San Francisco on Thursday of stealing AI trade secrets from the U.S. tech giant to benefit two Chinese companies he was secretly working for, the U.S. Department of Justice said on Thursday.

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 $5 million fine, while each trade secrets charge carries a maximum 10-year term and $250,000 fine.

Ding is scheduled to appear at a status conference on February 3, according to the DOJ.

An attorney for Ding, also known as Leon 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.

Ding's case was coordinated through an interagency Disruptive Technology Strike Force, created in 2023 by the Biden administration.

Prosecutors said Ding stole information about the hardware infrastructure and software platform that lets Google's supercomputing data centers train large AI models.

Some of the allegedly stolen chip blueprints were meant to give Google, owned by Alphabet GOOGL.O, an edge over cloud computing rivals Amazon.comAMZN.O and MicrosoftMSFT.O, which design their own, and reduce Google's reliance on chips from Nvidia NVDA.O.

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.

-Tom Hals and Courtney Rozen/Reuters