Feds ask judge to send ‘ham-fisted’ software engineer who stole Google trade secrets to prison for five years

Federal prosecutors are asking a judge to sentence Linwei “Leon” Ding, a former Google engineer convicted by a jury in January of stealing artificial intelligence trade secrets, to five years in prison, citing the scale of his theft and the need to deter other insiders. Ding, who stole 2,000 pages of data from Google's supercomputing data centers between May 2022 and April 2023, faces sentencing before Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco U.S. District Court, with his lawyers requesting three months of home confinement instead. The jury also found Ding guilty of seven counts of economic espionage, but Chhabria threw out those convictions on Aug. 20, citing insufficient evidence that Ding intended to provide secrets to the Chinese government.

Getting your Trinity Audio //trinityaudio.ai player ready...Federal prosecutors are asking a judge to sentence Linwei “Leon” Ding, convicted by a jury in January https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/01/29/google-tech-china-espionage-crime-spy-ai-economy-justice-court-steal/ of stealing artificial intelligence trade secrets from Google, to five years in prison. “That sentence reflects the scale and sophistication of his theft, his sustained deception, and the need to deter other insiders who may view stealing American technology as a shortcut to personal profit,” prosecutors said in a memo to the court this week. Ding, a Chinese citizen in his late 30s, started working at Google in 2019 and obtained a green card in 2021, according to court filings. Between May 2022 and April 2023, Ding stole 2,000 pages of data that prosecutors in a court filing described as “building blocks” of Google’s supercomputing data centers used to train and host large AI systems. Ding was arrested at his Newark home in 2024. His lawyers in a memo to Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco U.S. District Court on Tuesday asked the judge to keep Ding out of prison and instead sentence him to three months of home confinement. “Since his highly public March 2024 arrest, Linwei Ding has lost his career, his marriage, and his mental health,” the memo said. “He further faces likely removal from the United States, where he has lived for 16 years, even though his 8-year-old son, whom he cares for daily, is a U.S. citizen.” There is “no realistic prospect” that Ding would re-offend, the memo said. Ding’s career in Silicon Valley began in 2014, when he took a job working on computer chips for Marvell Technology in San Jose, the memo said. Before Google, he worked at two additional Silicon Valley companies not named in court filings. Now, because of his criminal record and the publicity around his case, Ding “will never again hold a position of trust at a technology company,” ending a career “he went to school for, enjoyed, and at which he thrived,” the memo said. Ding has opposed paying restitution to Google for his crimes, but has agreed with federal prosecutors that if Chhabria orders restitution, it should be $189,000, according to court documents. The jury had also found Ding guilty of seven counts of economic espionage https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/02/05/ex-googler-charged-by-us-with-espionage-to-boost-ai-in-china/ in connection with claims by federal prosecutors that he stole the secrets to benefit China. The jury’s finding came amid a high-stakes race between the U.S. and China for supremacy in artificial intelligence https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/03/08/explosive-dispute-questions-silicon-valleys-track-americans-robot-warfare/ , a technology that has boomed since San Francisco’s OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, opening up new frontiers for technological advancement, including in weapons systems and biotechnology. But on Aug. 20, Chhabria threw out Ding’s spying convictions, saying the evidence was insufficient to support them. “There was no indication at trial that any of Ding’s colleagues in China were affiliated with the government,” Chhabria wrote in his decision. “Nor was there indication that he intended to actually provide trade secrets to anyone in the Chinese government.” When he started pilfering Google’s secrets, Ding was “surreptitiously working for a private Chinese company,” and toward the end of the period when he was taking data, Ding was “secretly taking steps to start his own company,” Chhabria wrote. Although prosecutors in their sentencing memo filed Tuesday described Ding’s crimes as “sophisticated theft,” Chhabria in his order described Ding’s efforts to cover his tracks, and to spin his ill-gotten goods into his own startup, as “ham-fisted.” In late 2023, before traveling to China to promote his would-be startup Zhisuan — described by prosecutors as a China-based company proposing to develop technology to accelerate AI systems including AI supercomputers — Ding gave his Google security badge to his intern, Chhabria wrote. He told her to swipe it when she entered company offices in Sunnyvale, “so that it would seem like he was still going into the office,” Chhabria wrote. Google learned soon after that Ding was seeking investors for an AI firm in China, and cut off his access to the company’s computer systems, Chhabria wrote. Ding “rushed to the office at 7:00 a.m. to try to get back on the network,” Chhabria wrote. “When that didn’t work, he began deleting the trade secret documents that were still on his company-issued laptop although he apparently didn’t think to delete them from his personal Google Cloud account .” Evidence at the trial cast “serious doubt,” Chhabria wrote, on whether Ding “could get any sort of technology company off the ground at all, with or without the trade secret documents.” Ding’s sentencing is scheduled for Sept. 1.