Google Engineer Disputes AI Secrets in China Espionage Trial

Former Google LLC engineer Linwei Ding on the first day of his criminal trial pushed back on allegations that he stole over 100 valuable AI trade secrets from the tech giant to start a business in China, arguing that the documents he copied don’t meet the legal definition of a trade secret.

Ding’s attorney told a 16-person jury in San Francisco federal court during opening statements that the case was instead about prosecutors and Google deciding to target Ding and transform the company’s employee rules into criminal laws.

“You are not here to decide whether Linwei was a bad employee—you can be a bad employee,” Lora Krsulich of Goodwin Procter LLP told the jury. “That is not a crime.”

The trial caps off an almost two year prosecution in the US District Court for the Northern District of California where the Department of Justice alleges that Ding, a Chinese national who worked at Google from 2019 to 2023, stole over 100 documents containing Google’s proprietary technology for AI supercomputers and data centers.

While still an employee at Google, Ding founded an AI startup in China and told investors that he was one of 10 people in the world who could replicate Google’s AI supercomputing products.

He was originally indicted for seven counts of trade secrets theft in 2024, but was charged with an additional seven counts of economic espionage in early 2025 for his alleged attempt to benefit the Chinese government using the secrets. He’s pled not guilty to all counts.

One Puzzle Piece

Ding’s defense will largely argue that government has failed to show that the documents at issue meet the definition of a trade secret, which must be kept secret, reasonably protected by Google, and have economic valuee for being kept secret.

Krsulich told the jury that the 105 Google documents containing alleged AI trade secrets that Ding copied from the company network into his Apple Notes app met none of those criteria.

Much of the technology at issue, which pertains to the way Graphics Processing Units and Tensor Processing Units are connected to create supercomputers that train AI models, such as Google’s Gemini, is already publicly available in the form of Google patents that aren’t kept secret.

Other documents that Ding took that were labeled “Confidential” shouldn’t have been, such as an image of a cartoon, Krsulich said.

And the information he copied into his notes wasn’t economically valuable on its own, the attorney argued. The value comes from Google putting billions of dollars into AI infrastructure.

“It’s like taking a single puzzle piece out of a complex puzzle and calling it valuable,” Krsulich said. “Simply knowing what Google does, doesn’t make that technology valuable.”

A Second Career

Prosecutors in their opening statement to the jury presented a story of Ding’s lies and greed to build a new company off the back of propriety technology that Google took over a decade to develop. Ding had lied about his professional credentials to Chinese investors and hid his second career from Google, going so far as to ask his former intern to swipe his badge at Google’s headquarters while he was in China, prosecutors said.

Assistant US Attorney Casey Boome said that over the course of a year, from May 2022 to May 2023, Ding transferred over 14,000 files from Google to his own personal account. He bypassed Google’s internal monitoring system by copying and pasting text and diagrams from the documents onto his work laptop’s Apple Notes app where he then exported them to his personal computer.

In 2022, Ding began searching for an additional tech job in China and was hired as the Chief Technology Officer of a company called RongShu. At the same time, while still employed at Google, he uploaded roughly 50 trade secret documents to his computer.

He founded a new AI supercomputing company with RongShu’s CEO in 2023, around the same time he uploaded a second batch of trade secret documents.

His scheme began to fall apart in December 2023, shortly after he gave a large public presentation at a Chinese tech conference where he told potential investors about being able to replicate Google’s supercomputing platform. Google learned of his presentation and that he started the separate company and cut off his network access and terminated him at the end of the month.

“The defendant wanted more from his career than his own knowledge or skill could provide,” Boome said. “So he stole.”

The case is USA v. Ding, N.D. Cal., No. 3:24-cr-00141, 1/12/26.