Ex-Google engineer convicted of stealing AI secrets • The Register

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/30/google_engineer_convicted_ai_secrets_china/

Publish Date: 2026-01-30 16:26:00

A former Google software engineer has been convicted of stealing AI hardware secrets from the company for the benefit of two China-based firms, one of which he founded. The second startup intended to use these secrets to market its technology to PRC-controlled organizations.

On Thursday, Linwei (“Leon”) Ding, 38, was convicted on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of trade secret theft for stealing confidential information related to Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), and SmartNIC network interface cards.

“We’re grateful to the jury for making sure justice was served today, sending a clear message that stealing trade secrets has serious consequences,” said Lee-Anne Mulholland, VP of regulatory affairs at Google, in a statement provided to The Register.

According to the second superseding indictment [PDF] filed in September 2025, Ding began working for Google on May 13, 2019. He was responsible for developing software that helps GPUs function more efficiently for machine learning applications at Google and Google Cloud. In that role, he had access to information Google deemed confidential.

Google employs various physical and network security measures, including security guards, cameras at building entrances, badge-based building access restrictions, guest registration and accompaniment requirements, network data loss prevention monitoring, device identification and authentication, and network activity logging.

The company checks physical and network access activity using both automated tools and human review to flag discrepancies like network access via an IP address that doesn’t match the location of the employee’s access badge.

These measures later helped reconstruct Ding’s activities for investigators, but did not prevent or immediately detect his…

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