Former Google engineer Ding Linwei’s theft of AI secrets case has taken a turn. A federal judge in the United States on Thursday (August 20) overturned Ding Linwei’s guilty verdict on 7 counts of economic espionage, stating that the prosecution failed to prove that he knowingly or intended to benefit the Chinese government; however, the judge upheld his guilty verdict on 7 counts of stealing trade secrets, with sentencing scheduled for September 1.
The judge presiding over the case, Vince Chhabria of the U.S. Northern District of California Federal District Court, issued the ruling on Thursday, overturning Ding Linwei’s guilty verdict on 7 counts of economic espionage, citing insufficient evidence to prove that he intended or knowingly acted in a way that would benefit the Chinese government but determined that the evidence still supported his guilty verdict on stealing trade secrets.
After an 11-day trial in January this year, Ding Linwei was found guilty by the jury on all 7 counts of economic espionage and 7 counts of stealing trade secrets. According to court records, Ding Linwei first converted and uploaded a large amount of confidential files to his personal cloud from May 2022 to April 2023; then in December 2023 (two weeks before leaving the job), he downloaded the cloud data to his personal laptop.
The key difference between economic espionage and general trade secret theft lies in the former requiring the prosecution to prove that the defendant knowingly or intended to benefit a foreign government. Judge Chhabria ruled that the prosecution did not meet the standard of “exclusion of reasonable doubt” in this regard, hence overturning those charges.
Three weeks after the trial concluded, Ding Linwei’s lawyer filed a motion for acquittal, claiming that the prosecution failed to prove all the charges. In June this year, the judge continued to hear arguments on whether to dismiss the economic espionage charges and in late June rejected the motion for acquittal and retrial request concerning the theft of trade secrets while indicating a separate ruling on economic espionage charges.
Each count of economic espionage could have carried a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison and a $5 million fine; each count of stealing trade secrets could result in up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Ding Linwei’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for September 1.
In March 2024, a federal grand jury formally charged Ding Linwei with 4 counts of stealing trade secrets. In February 2025, the charges were expanded to include a total of 14 counts.
According to the March 2024 indictment, Ding Linwei joined Google in May 2019 and began stealing secrets three years later, while being courted by a Chinese startup company.
During his employment at Google, Ding Linwei was responsible for developing the software platform for the supercomputing data center, specifically aiming to make GPUs operate more efficiently for machine learning and AI applications.
The prosecution alleged that due to his position, he had special access to company confidential data, covering areas such as the supercomputing data center, AI, and hardware infrastructure. The indictment stated that he would copy internal document contents into the “Apple Notes” application on company-issued laptops, convert them to PDF files, and upload them to his personal cloud. Despite Google deploying detection systems, the company did not discover Ding Linwei’s activities until December 2023.