A former Google software engineer was arrested in March 2024 for allegedly stealing confidential AI information from the company while secretly working with two China-based companies.
Updated October 2026. This March 2024 report now includes the outcome of the case: Ding was convicted at trial in January 2026 and sentenced in September 2026. See the case update below.
Linwei Ding, 38, was arrested at his home in Newark, California, and initially charged with four counts of theft of trade secrets. At the time, each count carried a possible prison sentence of up to ten years and a fine of up to $250,000.
Ding was accused of transferring confidential information from Google’s network to a personal account while secretly working with two Beijing-based companies in the AI sector. Prosecutors said he had taken more than 500 confidential files.
The Justice Department will not tolerate the theft of artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies that could put our national security at risk,
said US Attorney General Merrick Garland.
He added,
We will fiercely protect sensitive technologies developed in America from falling into the hands of those who should not have them.
According to the charges, Ding joined Google in 2019 and worked on software for Google’s supercomputing data centers. He was accused of uploading confidential information to a personal cloud account starting in May 2022.
The theft includes files having information on Google’s hardware and the software program that Google uses to train Artificial intelligence models through machine learning.
The charge mentions that Ding was contacted by the CEO of a Chinese tech startup, where he was offered the position of chief technology officer. Not only this, Ding also founded his own China-based company and declared himself as its CEO.
The US Justice Department’s law enforcement leaders have expressed concern about Chinese agencies’ and companies’ espionage that could harm the nation’s security. Moreover, the utilization of AI technologies to negatively impact the United States can also not be neglected.
Case Update: Conviction and Sentence
In February 2025, a superseding indictment added economic espionage charges. On January 29, 2026, after an 11-day trial before U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco, a federal jury found Ding guilty on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets. According to the Justice Department, between about May 2022 and April 2023 Ding stole more than two thousand pages of confidential Google AI trade secrets and uploaded them to his personal Google Cloud account.
In August 2026, Judge Chhabria vacated the economic espionage convictions, finding the evidence insufficient for a rational jury to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Ding intended his actions to benefit the Chinese government. The theft of trade secrets convictions were not affected. On September 1, 2026, Ding was sentenced to just under one year in prison and two years of supervised release, and was ordered to pay restitution and a fine, as reported by KQED.
For more on legal disputes around AI, read Nvidia Sued By Authors For Using Copyrighted Work To Train NeMo AI and The New York Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft for Copyright Infringement.
