Google AI Espionage Trial Ends With Focus on Engineer’s Intent

A San Francisco federal jury is wading through over 100 Google documents detailing AI supercomputer technology and weighing the intentions of a former engineer who allegedly took them to build an AI startup in China.

Defense attorneys for Linwei Ding, a Chinese-born engineer first hired by Google in 2019, told the 12-person jury at closing arguments Wednesday that prosecutors had no evidence showing Ding intended to use any of the technical documents he copied to benefit his startup or the Chinese government.

“For months and months and months he apparently intended to do stuff that he never actually did,” Ding’s attorney Grant Fondo of Goodwin Procter LLP said. “The government is asking you to speculate.”

“He never used them, he never transferred them, he never tried to sell them,” Fondo said of the alleged trade secrets. The attorney argued that the documents Ding took didn’t meet the definition of a trade secret.

The closing statements end a two-and-a-half week criminal trial in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The jury began deliberations Wednesday afternoon and will continue Thursday.

Ding is charged with seven counts of trade secrets theft and seven counts of economic espionage for benefiting the People’s Republic of China that’s tied to his alleged theft. The jury must mark on its verdict which documents it believes are trade secrets that Ding stole.

Federal prosecutors told the jury that over an 18-month period ending in April 2023, Ding copied thousands of confidential internal Google documents into his Apple Notes App and then uploaded the files as PDFs to his personal computer. At the same time, while still employed at Google, Ding was searching for tech jobs in China and eventually found an AI startup Shanghai Zhisuan Technology Co. He told potential investors that he could create an AI supercomputer that replicates Google’s technology, prosecutors alleged.

“The defendant wanted more from himself than what his knowledge and experience could get him, so he stole, cheated, and lied,” Assistant US Attorney Molly Priedeman told the jury during closing arguments.

A timeline of his document copying and his startup activities line up, Priedeman said. When potential investors in China sought more technical details about his business, Ding would upload more Google documents to his computer.

At trial, prosecutors said the 105 documents at issue fell into seven different categories of trade secrets, all of them relating to how Google designs, builds, and connects specialized AI chips called Tensor Processing Units and Graphics Processing Units.

Priedeman said the government’s expert witnesses testified the documents Ding took from Google allow him to “skip huge parts of the design process” of an AI supercomputer that Google took over 10 years and millions of dollars to build.

Ding’s defense countered that all of the documents don’t qualify as trade secrets because Google failed to take reasonable measures to keep them secret. Many of the 105 documents could be accessed by over 160,000 Google employees, some of them had no confidentiality notices on them, and some of the information was already public in the form of patents.

The company’s confidentiality rating system didn’t make sense, Fondo told the jury.

“They weren’t labeling things correctly,” Fondo said. “No one seemed to know what the system was.”

The case is USA v. Ding, N.D. Cal., No. 3:24-cr-00141, closing arguments 1/28/26.