By Alex Wigglesworth
Publication Date: 2026-01-31 02:31:00
A former software engineer at Google has been convicted of stealing artificial intelligence trade secrets for the benefit of China, the U.S. Department of Justice said.
A federal jury on Thursday convicted Linwei Ding, 38, of seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets after an 11-day trial in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California.
The verdict marked the Justice Department’s first conviction on AI-related economic espionage charges, according to a statement from Roman Rozhavsky, assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence and espionage division.
Ding’s attorney did not respond to an email seeking comment Friday.
Ding stole more than 2,000 pages of confidential information containing Google’s AI trade secrets from the company’s network and uploaded them to his personal Google cloud account between May 2022 and April 2023, according to evidence presented at trial.
At the same time, he secretly worked with two…
