❓WHAT HAPPENED: The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on Friday that it secured a 14-count conviction against former Google software engineer Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, 38, for conducting economic espionage and stealing trade secrets on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
👤WHO WAS INVOLVED: Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding; the DOJ, Google, and the CCP.
📍WHEN & WHERE: Ding was convicted on 14 counts of economic espionage and stealing trade secrets on Thursday, January 29, 2026.
💬KEY QUOTE: “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.” — DOJ
🎯IMPACT: The issue of Chinese corporate espionage has been a serious problem in the United States and in other Western nations in recent years, especially in the AI and semiconductor industries.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on Friday that it secured a 14-count conviction against former Google software engineer Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, 38, for conducting economic espionage and stealing trade secrets on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). A federal jury in San Francisco found Ding guilty on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets on Thursday.
According to the DOJ, Ding stole thousands of pages of documents and files related to Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, uploading them from company servers to his own private Google Cloud account. In addition, between May 2022 and April 2023, while Google employed Ding, he also clandestinely worked for two China-based technology firms. It is believed he passed on trade secrets to these entities and sought to use Google’s technology to train his own large AI models.
“[B]y 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,” the DOJ revealed on Friday, continuing, “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.”
The issue of Chinese corporate espionage has been a serious problem in the United States and in other Western nations in recent years, especially in the AI and semiconductor industries. In late 2025, it was revealed that Chinese agents successfully recruited former employees of the Dutch company ASML, which mastered the Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography process that allows for the manufacture of some of the world’s most advanced semiconductors. Consequently, the CCP was able to construct a prototype EUV machine in Shenzhen, and will likely be able to produce advanced chips between 2028 and 2030.
The National Pulse reported in July of last year that Chenguang Gong, a dual citizen of the United States and China, pleaded guilty to stealing over 3,600 files containing military trade secrets from a Southern California defense contractor. These files included blueprints for advanced sensors used to detect and monitor hypersonic, ballistic, and nuclear missiles, as well as sensors designed to warn U.S. warplanes of incoming heat-seeking missiles and jam their infrared tracking systems.
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