Judge Upholds Conviction of Ex-Google Engineer Linwei Ding in AI Trade Secret Theft Case

A federal judge denied acquittal for former Google engineer Linwei Ding, convicted on 14 counts of trade secret theft and economic espionage. Sentencing is set for August 4.

Federal Judge Rejects Post-Trial Motions for Ex-Google Engineer Convicted of AI Secrets Theft

A federal judge in San Francisco on Monday denied a motion for judgment of acquittal — or, in the alternative, a new trial — filed by Linwei Ding, a former Google software engineer convicted earlier this year of stealing proprietary artificial intelligence technology for the benefit of Chinese companies, Courthouse News Service reports.

Ding was hired by Google in 2019 to help develop its supercomputing data centers. Prosecutors charged him with seven counts of theft of trade secrets and seven counts of economic espionage, each corresponding to one of seven categories of stolen information. Following a two-week trial in January, a San Francisco jury found him guilty on all 14 counts.

"Overwhelming evidence" cited by the court

In a nine-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria — an appointee of President Barack Obama — concluded that a rational juror could have found beyond a reasonable doubt that Ding intended to misappropriate the trade secrets. The government, he wrote, had presented "overwhelming evidence" that Ding planned to benefit himself and the company he was forming in China when he uploaded Google trade secrets between the spring of 2022 and spring of 2023.

"The fact that nobody ended up receiving a benefit is irrelevant; under the statute, all that matters is what Ding intended when he stole the documents," Chhabria wrote.

The judge also found that a rational juror could conclude Google had taken reasonable measures to protect its trade secrets and that the documents underlying the conviction were, on the whole, non-public — and therefore entitled to trade secret protection. The government had offered expert testimony, based on more than a year of reviewing the materials, supporting the conclusion that each alleged trade secret, taken as a whole, was not available in the public domain.

Defense arguments dismissed

Chhabria rejected the defense's argument that every document within a combination trade secret must independently contribute to its value. A collection of documents, he ruled, does not need to be maintained in a specific order, presented in its entirety, or contain a "unique compilation" of elements to qualify as a trade secret.

"Just as adding a superfluous annotation on the secret formula for Coca-Cola wouldn't render the formula unprotectable, adding one useless document to a collection of documents that would otherwise be protectable as a trade secret wouldn't necessarily render the collection unprotectable," he wrote. "Ultimately, what matters is whether the collection, as a whole, satisfies the definition of a trade secret."

The court further found that China did not need to have been a direct participant in the theft for the conduct to constitute economic espionage. Chhabria also dismissed the defense's claim that Ding was denied fair notice of the charges because the government did not specify in advance which trade secrets it would focus on at trial. Prosecutors initially identified 105 documents as containing Google trade secrets but ultimately concentrated on 18 of them.

"The reason this trial involved such a large volume of documents is that Ding took such a large volume of documents from Google," the judge wrote.

Scale of the document transfer

According to the government, Ding began copying files in the spring of 2022, transferring information from internal Google documents into a notes application on his company-issued laptop, converting those notes to PDFs, and uploading them to a personal cloud account. In total, prosecutors said Ding transferred 1,255 documents — comprising an estimated 14,000 pages — between spring 2022 and spring 2023. In December 2023, as scrutiny of his conduct at Google intensified, Ding downloaded the same documents from his personal cloud account onto a personal laptop.

Economic espionage question unresolved

Chhabria indicated he will issue a separate ruling on the defense's motion for acquittal specifically on the economic espionage counts, though he gave no timeline for that opinion. The distinction centers on the December 2023 downloads and whether they constitute a separate act of theft — a required element to prove economic espionage — or are part of the same ongoing offense as the earlier uploads.

At a May 12 hearing, Chhabria had expressed uncertainty: "I'm not sure it would have made sense looking at the statute to charge him with theft of trade secrets based on the downloading in December 2023 because he had already stolen the trade secrets." At a June 16 hearing, he pressed the issue further: "He committed the crime in April of theft of trade secrets. The crime is completed. How is downloading in December 2023 the same crime?"

Sentencing set for August 4

Ding is scheduled to be sentenced on August 4. He faces up to 10 years in prison and fines of as much as $250,000 for each trade secret count, in addition to up to 15 years in prison on each economic espionage count. Representatives for neither party responded immediately to a request for comment.

Source: Courthouse News Service