Ex-Google Engineer Fails to Escape AI Espionage Prosecution

A former Google LLC software engineer accused of stealing the company’s artificial intelligence trade secrets and bringing them to the People’s Republic of China failed to escape his federal criminal indictment.

Judge Vince Chhabria declined to dismiss the criminal case Wednesday against Linwei Ding, a Chinese national who joined Google in 2019, and is accused of violating trade secrets laws and the Economic Espionage Act.

Ding is accused of stealing technology involving Google’s chips that were used to power its AI models, such as Gemini, when he left the company in 2022 and founded an AI startup in China the ...