Former CIA official Tom Lyons testified in the Senate on Wednesday (April 22), citing multiple espionage incidents related to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including a former Google engineer’s theft of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) secrets for the CCP. He emphasized that the CCP uses the world’s largest intelligence system to suppress American enterprises with the aim of bankrupting them.
Lyons issued this warning during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. With over 20 years of experience handling Chinese economic espionage issues in the U.S. government and private sector, he informed lawmakers that these theft activities are detrimental to American companies.
At the same time, U.S. lawmakers also cautioned that the CCP’s theft of intellectual property in critical technology areas such as AI is posing an increasing national security threat.
Lyons stated that the competition between U.S. companies and Chinese counterparts is not ordinary, but rather a competition with the world’s largest intelligence system, whose mission includes driving American companies into bankruptcy.
He added that this is not like the competition between General Motors and Ford, but rather resembles a competition between a U.S. startup and the Chinese military.
Lyons mentioned a recent high-profile case in his testimony. The case involved a former Google employee stealing advanced AI secrets for the CCP.
On January 29, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that a San Francisco federal jury had found former Google software engineer Linwei Ding guilty. He was convicted on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets, mainly for stealing thousands of pages of confidential information from Google.
Evidence showed that Ding joined Google in May 2019 and started the theft three years later when he was being recruited by a Chinese tech company. He stole confidential Google data center hardware infrastructure and software platform information used to train the latest AI models.
According to the indictment, between May 2022 and May 2023, Ding privately uploaded over a thousand documents of business secrets stored in Google’s internal network to his personal Google cloud account.
The charges alleged that Ding intended to benefit the Chinese government by stealing Google’s business secrets. He was accused of stealing components of Google’s supercomputing data center. The data center is designed to support machine learning workloads for training and hosting large AI models.
President Trump has made AI a cornerstone of his policy agenda, advocating for the establishment of a unified federal regulatory framework rather than a patchwork of state laws. The Trump administration is also pushing to accelerate data center construction and enhance America’s competitiveness against the CCP.