San Francisco jury convicts former Google engineer of stealing AI trade secrets

A former Google engineer was found guilty by a federal jury in San Francisco on Thursday of stealing the company’s artificial intelligence technology trade secrets for China.

Linwei Ding, 38, was convicted on seven counts each of economic espionage and theft of trade secrets, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Ding, also known as Leon Ding, was charged with stealing thousands of pages of confidential information with Google trade secrets related to artificial intelligence technology for the benefit of the People’s Republic of China.

The jury’s verdict followed an 11-day trial before U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco.

“The jury delivered a clear message today that the theft of this valuable technology will not go unpunished.  We will vigorously protect American intellectual capital from foreign interests that seek to gain an unfair competitive advantage while putting our national security at risk,” United States Attorney Craig H. Missakian said.

Ding was originally indicted in March 2024. A superseding indictment returned in February 2025 charged him with seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets.

Between May 2022 and April 2023, while he was a Google employee, Ding stole more than two thousand pages of confidential information containing Google’s AI trade secrets from Google’s network and uploaded them to his personal Google Cloud account, prosecutors said.

Ding also secretly affiliated himself with two technology companies based in China while he was employed by Google, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

In multiple statements to potential investors, Ding claimed he could build an AI supercomputer by copying and modifying Google’s technology. In December 2023, less than two weeks before he resigned from Google, Ding downloaded the stolen Google trade secrets to his own personal computer, prosecutors said.

The jury found that Ding stole trade secrets relating to the hardware infrastructure and software platforms that allow Google’s supercomputing data center to train and serve large AI models.

Ding is scheduled to appear at a status conference on Feb. 3, 2026. He faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison for each count of theft of trade secrets  and 15 years in prison for each count of economic espionage.