On Thursday, January 29, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that former Google software engineer Linwei Ding was found guilty by a San Francisco federal jury of stealing Google’s AI technology and selling it to two Chinese companies for profit.
Linwei Ding, a 38-year-old Chinese citizen, was convicted after an 11-day trial of 7 counts of economic espionage and 7 counts of theft of trade secrets, mainly for stealing thousands of pages of confidential information.
Each count of economic espionage carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison and a $5 million fine, while each count of theft of trade secrets carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Linwei Ding is scheduled to appear in court on February 3, but his defense lawyer has not yet responded to the matter.
Linwei Ding was initially charged with four counts of theft of trade secrets in March 2024.
In 2025, U.S. prosecutors supplemented the indictment, expanding the scope of the charges. The case is a result of the coordinated efforts of a cross-departmental technology task force established by the U.S. government in 2023.
Prosecutors revealed that evidence showed Linwei Ding joined Google in May 2019 and began the theft three years later when he was being recruited by an early-stage Chinese tech company. He stole hardware infrastructure and software platform secrets from Google’s supercomputing data center, which were used to train state-of-the-art AI models.
It is reported that the stolen chip blueprints were originally intended to be sold to Google’s competitors Amazon and Microsoft, as these companies are developing their own chips to reduce reliance on Google and NVIDIA chips.
Google has stated it is cooperating with law enforcement investigations but has not provided a detailed response to the matter.
Given that U.S. tech companies lead in many technological fields, China dispatches numerous commercial spies to steal secrets, boost the research and development progress of Chinese companies, and potentially use these technologies to fulfill the Chinese Communist Party’s ambition for global dominance.
In late 2025, former Deputy and Acting Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) David R. Shedd and former DIA intelligence officer Andrew Badger released a new book titled “The Great Heist: China’s Epic Campaign to Steal America’s Secrets,” which extensively details how China steals foreign technology to achieve rapid development.
Several cases have shown instances where China has infiltrated cutting-edge industries. In November 2025, a federal jury convicted Chinese fiber laser expert Ji Wang of two counts of economic espionage, one count of theft of trade secrets, one count of attempted economic espionage, and one count of attempted theft of trade secrets.
Ji Wang stole hundreds of documents around July 1, 2016, including commercial secrets of various specialty fibers generated during his time with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Moreover, in August 2025, Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI sued former engineer Xuechen Li, accusing him of stealing trade secrets related to the Grok chatbot and providing them to xAI’s competitor, OpenAI.
The lawsuit stated that Li, a Chinese citizen residing in Mountain View, California, allegedly covered his tracks by deleting browser history and system logs, renaming, and compressing files to conceal his actions before uploading them to his personal system.
xAI claims that Li confessed in writing and verbally that he misappropriated xAI’s confidential information and attempted to cover up the theft. When Li left the company, he signed a document declaring that he had returned all company property, deleted all copies of files, and upheld the company’s confidentiality agreement.