Last week in San Francisco, Linwei Ding (also called Leon Ding) was convicted of economic espionage and theft of trade secrets. He was charged with stealing “over 2,000 pages of confidential Google AI documents on supercomputing infrastructure….” (Mlq.ai, February 1, 2026).
Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division stated that the conviction marks the “first-ever…on AI-related economic espionage charges.”
The Justice Department reports that Ding was “originally indicted in March 2024. A superseding indictment returned in February 2025 described seven categories of trade secrets stolen by Ding and charged Ding with seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets.”
According to the evidence presented at trial, between approximately May 2022 and April 2023, while a Google employee, Ding stole more than two thousand pages of confidential information containing Google’s AI trade secrets from Google’s network and uploaded them to his personal Google Cloud account.
Ding also secretly affiliated himself with two PRC-based technology companies while he was employed by Google: around June 2022, Ding was in discussions to be the chief technology officer for an early-stage technology company based in the PRC [People’s Republic of China]; by early 2023, Ding was in the process of founding his own technology company in the PRC focused on AI and machine learning and was acting as the company’s CEO. In multiple statements to potential investors, Ding claimed that he could build an AI supercomputer by copying and modifying Google’s technology.
In December 2023, less than two weeks before he resigned from Google, Ding downloaded the stolen Google trade secrets to his own personal computer.
Justice says that Ding faces up to ten years in prison for each count on which he was convicted of stealing trade secrets and 15 years for each count on which he was convicted of economic espionage. The jury found him guilty of seven counts in the first category and seven counts in the second category. If he gets the maximum possible sentence, that’s 70 years plus 105 years, or 175 years.
Ding’s lawyer contended that because Google made it so easy for Ding to steal its trade secrets, he didn’t really steal any trade secrets. The lawyer “argued that the documents in question were available to thousands of employees and therefore could not have contained trade secrets, adding ‘Google chose openness over security,’ according to Courthouse News Service.”
If this was the lawyer’s best argument, no wonder the jury wasn’t swayed. By this reasoning, any cat burglar who finds your front door open can’t be stealing your stuff when he takes your stuff…not really…because you made it so easy. Of course, if Ding had had any doubt about whether Google were implicitly giving all of its technical documentation to all of its employees, not regarding the documents as recording trade secrets, he could have simply asked any Google officer “Hey, would it be okay with Google if I download more than two thousand pages of Google’s technical documentation of its AI and use it to start up my own AI firm in the People’s Republic of China?” He did not ask because he already knew the answer.
