Linwei Ding sentenced to prison for stealing Google AI secrets

Former Google software engineer Linwei Ding has been sentenced to 364 days in prison for stealing confidential artificial intelligence technology. Between May 2022 and May 2023, Ding secretly transferred approximately 1,255 documents—equivalent to roughly 14,000 pages—from Google’s internal network to his personal cloud account.

The stolen data included highly sensitive hardware and software blueprints for Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), which are custom AI chips used to train massive large-scale models, as well as information regarding supercomputing data centers. Ding reportedly converted files to PDF format to evade security detection.

While employed at Google, Ding was also serving as the Chief Technology Officer for a Chinese startup and was attempting to launch his own AI company in China. Although a San Francisco jury initially found him guilty of economic espionage, Judge Vince Chhabria dismissed the espionage charges due to insufficient evidence that the theft was intended to benefit the Chinese government specifically. However, the judge characterized the theft of trade secrets as a “systematic, brazen effort to steal Google’s property” for personal gain.

In addition to his prison sentence, Ding must pay restitution and fines totaling over $200,000 and will serve two years of supervised release.