A former Google software engineer found guilty of stealing the tech giant’s trade secrets was sentenced to just under a year in prison Tuesday.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria called Linwei Ding’s theft of proprietary information a “systematic, brazen effort to steal Google’s property,” during Tuesday’s sentencing in San Francisco.
“He knew very well what he was doing. He hurt people along the way,” Chhabria added.
In January, a San Francisco jury found Ding, 38, guilty of seven counts of theft of proprietary information related to Google’s artificial intelligence efforts and economic espionage, based on prosecutors’ allegations that he intended to use that information to benefit China.
Chhabria vacated the espionage conviction in August, finding that a reasonable jury would have had insufficient evidence to find him guilty. Ding came to the U.S. to pursue a master’s degree in 2010, and worked at multiple tech companies in the Silicon Valley before he was hired as a software engineer at Google in 2019.
He became a lawful permanent resident in 2021.
In his January trial, prosecutors said that over a course of a year, he uploaded more than 500 confidential files from Google’s network to a personal Google Cloud account.
They said the information included “trade secrets” related to Google’s hardware infrastructure and software for supercomputing data centers to train large AI models.
They also laid out his ties to multiple China-based technology companies working on related AI efforts amid the U.S. and China’s race to dominate AI, alleging that he stole and copied trade secrets with the intention of benefitting the Chinese government.
Prosecutors said months after Ding began up confidential information to his personal cloud, he was offered a position as Chief Technology Officer at an early-stage technology company in China.
He visited the company, Rongshu, in late 2022 and began participating in investor meetings around December. In 2023, also Ding founded his own technology company, based in China called Zhisuan, which proposed to train large AI models.
According to country filings, a Zhisuan company document Ding circulated in November 2023 said: “We have experience with Google’s ten-thousand-card computational power platform; we just need to replicate and upgrade it and then further develop a computational power platform suited to China’s national conditions.”
Around the end of 2023, Ding also applied to a Chinese government “talent program” that aimed to attract technological talent to China with funding and investments, according to the court documents.
Ding never told Google about his affiliation with either company, prosecutors said, and he had an intern swipe his Google identification card multiple times when he was in China pitching Zhisuan, “to make it appear as though he was working from his office.”
While Ding was initially found guilty of both the trade secrets and espionage counts, Chhabria made the rare move to overturn the latter in August. In his motion to partially acquit Ding, he wrote that “the evidence was insufficient for a rational jury to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Ding knew or intended” between the springs of 2022 and 2023 “ that his actions would benefit the Chinese government.”
Ding’s attorneys requested a more lenient sentence of three months in home confinement so that he could continue to be his eight-year-old son’s primary caregiver, and, they argued, because he had already been punished by the case and conviction.
“Mr. Ding will never again hold a position of trust at a technology company,”the sentencing memo reads. “His convictions and the publicity surrounding them have foreclosed the career he went to school for, enjoyed, and at which he thrived. Zhisuan is defunct, and Mr. Ding faces possible removal from the United States.”
Ding’s defense also argued that his circumstances — including widespread press coverage and professional, personal and financial “ruin” were also sufficient to deter others from taking similar actions.
But Chhabria said that a sentence between zero and six months didn’t capture the crime that Ding committed.
“If you think about it from the standpoint of the seriousness of his offense … whether you think about it from standpoint of general deterrence or specific deterrence — the idea of a noncustodial sentence is hard to swallow for me,” Chhabria said, before handing down the sentence.
Ding will also be subject to two years of supervised release following his prison term, and have to pay a restitution of more than $189,000, plus a $25,000 fine.
KQED’s Nastia Voynovskaya contributed to this report.