Overview
- A federal judge in San Francisco sentenced former Google engineer Linwei Ding to 12 months minus one day in prison on Tuesday for stealing proprietary files tied to Google’s AI training hardware and software.
- The court ordered two years of supervised release, more than $189,000 in restitution and a $25,000 fine while upholding seven trade‑secret convictions against Ding.
- Judge Vince Chhabria vacated the economic‑espionage convictions in August after finding the evidence insufficient to prove Ding intended his actions would benefit the Chinese government during the period charged.
- Prosecutors presented evidence that between May 2022 and May 2023 Ding transferred hundreds to more than 1,000 internal files—covering TPUs, GPUs, chip‑communication code, orchestration software and Google’s SmartNIC designs—to personal accounts and to China‑linked startups.
- Experts and court filings say the seized materials could shorten the work needed to build large AI training systems, and Ding now faces practical consequences including career ruin, possible immigration removal and loss of parental caregiving arrangements.