A federal jury in San Francisco convicted former Google software engineer Linwei "Leon" Ding, 38, on January 30, 2026 of seven counts of economic espionage under 18 U.S.C. § 1831 and seven counts of theft of trade secrets under 18 U.S.C. § 1832 following an 11-day trial before U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in the Northern District of California. The Department of Justice described the verdict as the first-ever conviction on AI-related economic-espionage charges. Evidence showed that between approximately May 2022 and April 2023 Ding stole more than two thousand pages of confidential Google material and uploaded it to a personal Google Cloud account; the trade secrets covered the architecture of Google's custom Tensor Processing Unit chips and systems, its GPU systems, the software that orchestrates thousands of chips into AI supercomputers, and Google's custom SmartNIC network interface card. While employed by Google, Ding secretly affiliated with two PRC-based technology companies, lining up a CTO role in mid-2022 and by early 2023 founding and running his own China-based AI startup, and in late 2023 he applied to a Shanghai government talent program promising to help China achieve "computing power infrastructure capabilities that are on par with the international level." Ding was originally indicted in March 2024 and faces up to 10 years per trade-secret count and 15 years per economic-espionage count at sentencing.

Sources

• -https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-google-engineer-found-guilty-economic-espionage-and-theft-confidential-ai-technology
• -https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/30/google_engineer_convicted_ai_secrets_china