US charges ex-Googler with espionage to boost AI in China

A Chinese software engineer who worked for Alphabet Inc.'s Google faces new charges of economic espionage by the US Justice Department for allegedly stealing trade secrets to boost China's AI industry. Linwei Ding, who was indicted in March, now faces seven counts of economic espionage along with seven counts of theft of trade secrets under a new indictment announced Tuesday.

Donald Trump vowed during his campaign for president to "curtail China's ability to conduct espionage" targeting the US military and other prized technology.

Ding, a Chinese national who joined Google in 2019 and also goes by Leon Ding, allegedly stole technology involving the the company's home-grown chip that the search giant uses to train its AI models, such as Gemini, and graphical processing units. He pleaded not guilty to the original charges in March.


In his application, Ding touted a product that "will help China to have computing power infrastructure capabilities that are on par with the international level," according to the indictment.

Ding founded a startup in 2023 in China and also applied to a Shanghai-based "talent program" that offers monetary rewards to people who bring technical know-how back to China after doing research and development overseas, according to the indictment.