SAN FRANCISCO — A federal jury in San Francisco recently convicted a former Google software engineer of economic espionage and theft of trade secrets for stealing thousands of pages of confidential information on artificial intelligence technology, according to authorities.
The jury on Thursday, after an 11-day trial, convicted 38-year-old Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets, authorities said.
“This conviction exposes a calculated breach of trust involving some of the most advanced AI technology in the world at a critical moment in AI development,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg said in a U.S Department of Justice news release.
Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division described the case as “the first-ever conviction on AI-related economic espionage charges,” according to the news release.
Ding uploaded over 2,000 pages of confidential information containing Google’s AI trade secrets and uploaded them to his personal Google Cloud account between May 2022 and April 2023, according to the department.
Ding also secretly affiliated himself with two China-based technology companies while he was employed by Google, authorities said. Around June 2022, he was in discussions to be the chief technology officer for an early-stage technology company based in China, and by early 2023, he was in the process of founding his own technology company in China focused on AI and machine learning and was acting as the company’s CEO, according to the department.
In multiple statements to potential investors, Ding claimed that he could build an AI supercomputer by copying and modifying Google’s technology, authorities said. In December 2023, less than two weeks before he resigned from Google, Ding downloaded the stolen Google trade secrets to his own personal computer, according to the department.
The jury found that Ding stole trade secrets relating to the hardware infrastructure and software platforms that allow Google’s supercomputing data center to train and serve large AI models, authorities said.
The evidence at trial also showed that Ding intended to benefit two entities controlled by the government of China by assisting with the development of an AI supercomputer and collaborating on the research and development of custom machine learning chips, according to the department.
Ding faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison for each count of theft of trade secrets and 15 years in prison for each count of economic espionage, authorities said.