Former Google software engineer Linwei "Leon" Ding, 38, was convicted on January 30, 2026 by a San Francisco federal jury on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets for stealing confidential Google AI technology for the benefit of the People's Republic of China. Between approximately May 2022 and April 2023, while a Google employee, Ding exfiltrated more than two thousand pages of confidential information from Google's network and uploaded them to his personal Google Cloud account, with the trade secrets covering the architecture and functionality of Google's custom Tensor Processing Unit chips and systems, its Graphics Processing Unit systems, the orchestration software that turns thousands of chips into an AI supercomputer, and Google's custom-designed SmartNIC network interface card. While still employed at Google, Ding secretly affiliated with two PRC-based technology companies, discussing a CTO role at one in June 2022 and acting as CEO of his own AI and machine-learning startup by early 2023, and in late 2023 he applied to a Shanghai government "talent plan." Less than two weeks before resigning from Google in December 2023, he downloaded the stolen material to his personal computer. The verdict followed an 11-day trial before U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, capping a case originally indicted in March 2024 and expanded by a February 2025 superseding indictment; Ding faces up to 10 years per trade-secret count and 15 years per economic-espionage count. FBI Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky called it the first-ever conviction on AI-related economic espionage charges.

Sources

• -https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-google-engineer-found-guilty-economic-espionage-and-theft-confidential-ai-technology