Ex-Google Engineer Gets Nearly 1 Year for Stealing AI Secrets
A former Google software engineer found guilty of stealing the tech giant’s trade secrets was sentenced to just under a year in prison Tuesday.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria called Linwei Ding’s theft of proprietary information a “systematic, brazen effort to steal Google’s property,” during Tuesday’s sentencing in San Francisco.
“He knew very well what he was doing. He hurt people along the way,” Chhabria added.
In January, a San Francisco jury found Ding, then 38, guilty of seven counts of theft of proprietary information related to Google’s artificial intelligence efforts and economic espionage, based on charges that he intended to use that information to benefit China.
Chhabria vacated the espionage conviction in August, finding that a reasonable jury would have had insufficient evidence to find Ding guilty. Ding came to the U.S. to pursue a master’s degree in 2010. He worked at multiple tech companies in the Silicon Valley before Google hired him as a software engineer in 2019.
He became a lawful permanent resident in 2021.
At trial in January, the prosecution showed that Ding uploaded more than 500 confidential files over a course of a year from Google’s network to a personal Google Cloud account.
Prosecutors said the files included trade secrets related to Google’s hardware infrastructure and software for supercomputing data centers to train large AI models.
Prosecutors also laid out Ding’s ties to multiple technology companies in China purportedly working on related AI efforts amid the U.S. and China’s race to dominate the industry. They said Ding stole and copied trade secrets with the intention of benefitting the Chinese government.
Months after Ding began uploading confidential information to his personal Cloud, prosecutors said an early-stage technology company in China offered him chief technology officer position.
Ding visited the company, Rongshu, in late 2022 and began participating in investor meetings around December. In 2023, Ding founded Zhisuan, his own technology company based in China, which proposed to train large AI models.
Ding’s indictment quotes a Zhisuan document Ding circulated in November 2023 as touting: “We have experience with Google’s ten-thousand-card computational power platform; we just need to replicate and upgrade it and then further develop a computational power platform suited to China’s national conditions.”
In late 2023, Ding also applied to a Chinese government program that aimed to attract technological talent to China with funding and investments, according to the court documents.
Ding never told Google about his affiliation with either company, prosecutors said, and he had an intern swipe his Google identification card multiple times when he was in China pitching Zhisuan, “to make it appear as though he was working from his office.”
While Ding was initially found guilty of both the trade-secrets and espionage counts, Chhabria made the rare move to overturn the latter in August.
In his order to partially acquit Ding, Chhabria wrote: “The evidence was insufficient for a rational jury to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Ding knew or intended during the May 2022–April 2023 timeframe that his actions would benefit the Chinese government.”
Defense attorneys requested a more lenient sentence of three months in home confinement so that Ding could continue to be the primary caregiver for his 8-year-old son, and, they argued, because he had already been punished by the case and conviction.
“Mr. Ding will never again hold a position of trust at a technology company,” the sentencing memo states. “His convictions and the publicity surrounding them have foreclosed the career he went to school for, enjoyed, and at which he thrived. Zhisuan is defunct, and Mr. Ding faces possible removal from the United States.”
Ding’s defense also argued that his circumstances — including widespread press coverage and professional, personal and financial “ruin” — were also sufficient to deter others from taking similar actions.
But Chhabria said that a sentence between zero and six months didn’t capture the crime that Ding committed.
“If you think about it from the standpoint of the seriousness of his offense … whether you think about it from standpoint of general deterrence or specific deterrence — the idea of a noncustodial sentence is hard to swallow for me,” Chhabria said, before handing down the sentence.
Ding will also be subject to two years of supervised release after his prison term, and he owes restitution of more than $189,000, plus a $25,000 fine.
KQED’s Nastia Voynovskaya contributed to this report.