Former Google engineer Linwei Ding convicted of stealing AI secrets for China

A federal jury in San Francisco convicted former Google software engineer Linwei Ding on January 30, 2026, on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of trade secret theft — the first AI-related economic espionage conviction in U.S. history. Between 2022 and 2023, Ding stole more than 2,000 pages of confidential details about Google's Tensor Processing Unit chips and GPU systems, uploading files to a personal cloud account while secretly acting as CEO of a China-based AI startup. Ding faces up to 15 years per espionage count.