Linwei Ding Google AI trade secret case

Former Google software engineer Linwei Ding, a Chinese national, faced legal proceedings regarding the theft of approximately 14,000 pages of confidential artificial intelligence infrastructure documents.

In August 2026, a U.S. federal judge partially overturned Ding’s convictions. While the court upheld the charges for theft of trade secrets, Judge Vince Chhabria vacated seven counts of economic espionage, ruling there was insufficient evidence to prove Ding intended to benefit the Chinese government.

Following this ruling, Ding was sentenced in September 2026 to 12 months (364 days) in prison. The judge described the misappropriation of Google’s assets as a “systematic and blatant effort” to support a company Ding was establishing in China. The one-year sentence was notably lower than the 70-month term requested by federal prosecutors.

Investigations revealed that between May 2022 and May 2023, Ding transferred roughly 1,255 documents to a personal cloud account, including sensitive hardware and software blueprints for Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and supercomputing data center information. To evade security detection, Ding reportedly converted files to PDF format. During his employment, Ding also served as the Chief Technology Officer for a Chinese startup. In addition to his prison term, Ding is required to pay over $200,000 in restitution and fines and will serve two years of supervised release.