A former Google software engineer faces new charges for allegedly stealing artificial intelligence (AI) trade secrets while secretly working for two China-based companies, federal prosecutors announced on Feb. 4.
Linwei Ding, a 38-year-old Chinese national who was indicted in March, now faces seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets under a superseding indictment. The defendant, who also goes by Leon Ding, is free on bond.
Ding, who joined Google in 2019, allegedly uploaded more than 1,000 confidential files from Google’s network to his personal Google Cloud account from May 2022 to May 2023.
Prosecutors said the confidential files contained trade secrets about Google’s hardware infrastructure and software platform, which allows the company’s supercomputing data centers to train and serve large AI models….