Google engineer convicted of stealing AI trade secrets for China
A Google software engineer was convicted in January 2026 of stealing and attempting to sell artificial intelligence trade secrets to Chinese companies. In May 2026, a federal judge expressed doubt about whether the economic espionage charges were adequately supported.
What happened
Linwei Ding, a 38-year-old Chinese citizen employed as a software engineer at Google since May 2019, downloaded and copied 1,255 internal company documents totaling approximately 14,000 pages to his personal cloud account between spring 2022 and December 2023.
The stolen documents included secrets related to Google's AI technology and supercomputing data center hardware and software used for training large language models. In January 2026, after an 11-day trial, Ding was convicted on all 14 counts: 7 counts of theft of trade secrets and 7 counts of economic espionage.
Reported impact
The U.S. Department of Justice stated that the stolen technical specifications included chip designs intended for sale to Amazon and Microsoft, competitors developing their own chips to reduce reliance on Google and NVIDIA processors.
Index analysis
In May 2026, U.S. federal judge Vince Chhabria expressed skepticism about whether the evidence supported the economic espionage convictions, questioning whether moving already-stolen documents to another medium constitutes espionage and whether Ding's November 2023 interaction with a Chinese institution could prove intent months earlier.
Governance controls
The case reflects broader concerns cited by China's Ministry of State Security that foreign intelligence agencies are intensifying efforts to steal secrets in artificial intelligence and other strategic emerging industries through phishing, dark web trading, and recruitment of insiders.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.