Ex-Google Engineer Guilty of Stealing AI Tech for Chinese Firm

Linwei Ding, a former Google engineer, has been found guilty by a federal court in the Northern District of California on 14 counts of economic espionage and trade secrets theft, according to the case USA v. Ding, N.D. Cal., No. 3:24-cr-00141, 1/29/26. He allegedly stole hundreds of documents on AI chip technology to fuel a startup in China, transferring thousands of internal Google documents into his Apple Notes App before converting them to PDFs and uploading them to a personal cloud account.

In total, he reportedly transferred 1,255 documents, totalling an estimated 14,000 pages, over the course of a year, with the activity beginning in May 2022 and later extending until January 2024 as per the superseding indictments. He was arrested in March 2024, and a superseding indictment in February 2025 added further charges and expanded the dates of the alleged crimes. The proceedings are described in DataBreaches[.]Net, which notes the broader pattern of insider threats against tech firms. Ding is also known by the name Leon Ding.