A federal jury in San Francisco has found ex-Google Engineer Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, guilty of stealing thousands of pages of highly confidential AI trade secrets to benefit two China-based tech companies he had secretly aligned with.
The court found the 38-year-old Chinese national guilty on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets following an 11-day trial that detailed a blatant breach of trust. Mr. Ding, who had been a trusted software engineer on Google"s AI super-computing team, now potentially faces a very long stint in federal prison, with up to 15 years in prison and a $5 million fine for each count of economic espionage, and up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for each count of trade secret theft
Ding joined Google in 2019, where he worked on the fundamental software platform and hardware infrastructure for training large AI models, some of the most sensitive technology Google possesses.
Prosecutors believe he began stealing around May 2022 and continued until April 2023, when he was actively involved with two Chinese rivals. He was in discussions to become the Chief Technology Officer for one early-stage company, and he co-founded his own AI firm in China, Shanghai Zhisuan Technologies Co., explicitly telling potential investors that his new start-up could replicate Google"s powerful AI super-computing architecture.
He allegedly copied thousands of internal Google documents, uploaded them to his personal Google Cloud account, and also used methods such as copying documents onto his Apple Notes App.
The internal documents he stole included sensitive design details and blueprints for proprietary technology, such as Google"s custom-designed machine learning chips, the Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and Graphical Processing Units (GPUs).
This case might remind you of the lawsuit filed by Apple a couple of months back, where the iPhone maker sued a former employee, Dr. Chen Shi, and his new employers, the Chinese firm Oppo and its U.S. research arm, InnoPeak Technology.
Apple"s complaint alleges Dr. Shi downloaded 63 sensitive documents related to the Apple Watch and its health sensors, after he had specifically lied to colleagues that he was leaving to return to China to care for his elderly parents and had no job lined up.