Ex-Googler charged by US with espionage to boost AI in China

A Chinese software engineer who worked for Alphabet Inc.’s Google faces new charges of economic espionage by the US Justice Department for allegedly stealing trade secrets to boost China’s AI industry.

Linwei Ding, who was indicted in March, now faces seven counts of economic espionage along with seven counts of theft of trade secrets under a revised indictment announced Tuesday. 

Donald Trump vowed during his campaign for president to “curtail China’s ability to conduct espionage” targeting the US military and other prized technology. Last week, a former Senior Adviser for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was arrested on US charges of conspiring to steal government trade secrets to benefit China. 

Ding, a Chinese national who joined Google in 2019 and also goes by Leon Ding, allegedly stole technology involving the the company’s home-grown chip that the search giant uses to train its AI models, such as Gemini, and graphical processing units. He pleaded not guilty to the original charges in March.

He founded a startup in 2023 in China and also applied to a Shanghai-based “talent program” that offers monetary rewards to people who bring technical know-how back to China after doing research and development overseas, according to the indictment.

In his application, Ding touted a product that “will help China to have computing power infrastructure capabilities that are on par with the international level,” according to the indictment. An internal memo from his startup shows it planned to offer products and services to Chinese state agencies and universities, the US alleges.

If convicted, Ding faces as long as 15 years in prison for each count of economic espionage, and up to 10 years for each of the trade secret theft charges, according to prosecutors. 

Ding’s lawyers didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

A Google spokesperson said Ding acted alone and that the company was able to act quickly and refer the case to law enforcement after discovering the problem.

“We have strict safeguards to prevent the theft of our confidential commercial information and trade secrets,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda said in an emailed statement. “We are grateful to the FBI for helping protect our information and will continue cooperating with them closely.”