A former Google software engineer was found guilty by a federal jury in the United States for the theft of trade secrets pertaining to artificial intelligence, with the aim of benefiting Chinese companies.
Following an 11-day trial in federal court in San Francisco, California, Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, 38, was found guilty on 14 felony counts, including seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of trade secret theft. The case involved the theft of thousands of pages of documents about Google’s AI systems, Reuters reported.
Ding joined Google in May 2019 as a software engineer, and his job role gave him access to highly confidential information about the AI technology and the supercomputing infrastructure, i.e., the software and hardware requirements to train big AI models.
The prosecution also presented evidence that Ding broke the law by accessing and stealing over 2,000 pages of Google’s exclusive AI trade secrets between May 2022 and April 2023. Despite Ding being a Google employee, he continued to upload the stolen documents to his personal Google Cloud account. Without informing Google, Ding was simultaneously working with two Chinese tech companies.
According to the prosecution, he had negotiated a position as chief technology officer for a Chinese tech firm before starting his own AI business with a focus on supercomputing and machine learning in China. In his investment pitch, Ding said that he could use the stolen data to duplicate Google’s sophisticated AI infrastructure.
The US Department of Justice states that Ding’s conduct was a significant risk for both economic competitiveness and national security. The maximum penalty for each offence of economic espionage carries a 15-year prison term as well as a $5 million fine. The optimum penalty for each offence for stealing a trade secret is 10 years in jail and a $250,000 fine.
Prosecutors contended during the trial that Ding’s crime evaded security procedures and enabled him to profit from the overseas businesses he was covertly connected to. They said that his activities could have provided those companies a significant edge in the fiercely competitive global AI market.
Ding’s defence counsel disputed this claim, arguing that some of the materials were not legal “trade secrets” and that Google had failed to protect the secrets. Moreover, the defence argued that there was insufficient evidence of the defendant using the stolen content.
However, these arguments were ignored by the jury, which found all defendants guilty.
Ding was initially charged with four counts of trade secret theft in March 2024. The number of allegations increased when a superseding indictment was made in February. Ding is scheduled to appear before the court again on February 3 for a status hearing. The court will take into account the severity of the offences and other considerations while deciding on his final sentence.
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