A federal jury in San Francisco convicted former Google software engineer Linwei “Leon” Ding on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of trade-secret theft tied to Google’s AI technology, in what the Justice Department called the first U.S. conviction for AI-related economic espionage. Prosecutors said Ding uploaded thousands of pages detailing Google’s TPU chip architecture, GPU systems and SmartNIC designs to his personal cloud while working with China-based firms and planning his own startup. The defense argued Google’s internal openness undercut its trade-secret claims. Ding faces up to 10 years per trade-secret count and 15 years per espionage count, as Washington intensifies efforts to protect critical AI know-how amid a U.S.-China tech rivalry.
Ex-Google Engineer Convicted of Espionage, Theft of AI Trade Secrets
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