Ex-Google Engineer Accused of Stealing AI Trade Secrets and Sharing Them with China

A former Google software engineer has been charged in California with stealing trade secrets related to artificial intelligence from an Alphabet unit for two Chinese companies where he worked secretly.

Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, was indicted by a federal grand jury in San Francisco on Tuesday on four counts of theft of trade secrets.

A 38-year-old Chinese citizen was arrested Wednesday morning at his home in Newark, California. His attorney could not immediately be identified.

Ding’s charges came a little more than a year after the Biden administration created the interagency Disruptive Technology Strike Force to help prevent countries such as China and Russia from acquiring advanced technology or potentially threatening national security.

“The Department of Justice simply does not tolerate the theft of trade secrets and intelligence,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a conference in San Francisco.

According to the indictment, Ding stole detailed information about the hardware infrastructure and software platform that enables Google’s supercomputer data centers to train large artificial intelligence models using machine learning.

According to the indictment, the stolen data included details of the chips and systems and software that help power the supercomputer, which “fits at the cutting edge of machine learning and artificial intelligence technology.”

Google designed some of the allegedly stolen chip blueprints to gain an edge over rivals Amazon.com and Microsoft, which are designing their own, and to reduce its reliance on Nvidia chips.

Hired by Google in 2019, Ding allegedly began his theft three years later, while being courted as CTO of an early-stage Chinese tech company, and by May 2023 had downloaded more than 500 confidential files.

According to the indictment, Ding founded his own technology company that month and shared a document with the discussion group that said: “We have experience with Google’s ten-thousand-card computing power platform; we just need to copy and upgrade it.”

Google became suspicious of Ding in December 2023 and took his laptop on January 4, 2024, the day before Ding planned to resign.

Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said: “We have strict safeguards in place to prevent the theft of confidential commercial information and trade secrets. After an investigation, we discovered that this employee stole multiple documents, and we quickly referred the matter to law enforcement.

Ding faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for each count.