A former Google engineer, Linwei Ding (aka Leon Ding), has been convicted in the United States on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets for taking over 2,000 documents containing Google’s AI trade secrets. According to the Department of Justice, the theft involved confidential information linked to Google's AI infrastructure, including details about the data centre architecture, CMS software, and AI models.
Ding was indicted in March 2024 for transferring sensitive information from Google’s network to his personal Google Cloud account, and the theft occurred between May 2022 and April 2023; he downloaded the documents in December 2023, less than two weeks before resigning. He joined Google in 2019 and later affiliated himself with two China-based tech firms, including a startup named Shanghai Zhisuan Technologies Co., which he founded in 2023.
He is scheduled to appear at a status conference on 3 February 2026 and faces a maximum sentence of 10 years for each theft count and 15 years for each economic espionage count.