Ex-Google engineer’s espionage convictions overturned, theft convictions stand

A federal judge has thrown out seven economic espionage convictions against the former Google engineer Linwei Ding, on the grounds that prosecutors never proved he was working for China. Seven trade secret theft convictions stand.

Judge Vince Chhabria found the evidence sufficient to show that Ding took what he took, but insufficient to show that he intended or knew his conduct would benefit the Chinese government. That distinction is the whole of the difference between the two sets of charges.

Economic espionage under US law requires a foreign state connection, which is what makes it the charge of choice in a period when Washington has been framing AI theft as a national security problem. Theft of trade secrets requires no such thing, and it was on the state connection that this case fell apart after conviction rather than before it.

A jury had found Ding guilty on all 14 counts in January, following an 11-day trial. The economic espionage counts carried up to 15 years each, and the theft counts up to 10, so the ruling removes the heavier half of his exposure entirely.

What Ding was found to have taken is not in dispute. Prosecutors said he removed thousands of pages of confidential material on Google’s AI infrastructure, including hardware blueprints and the software platforms the company uses to train large language models in its data centres.

That is the tensor processing unit stack, which is the part of Google that is genuinely difficult to replicate and the reason the case drew the attention it did. The Justice Department presented it as the archetype of the technology transfer problem it has been warning about.

The warning has been getting louder. The White House has accused China of industrial-scale model distillation and committed to sharing intelligence with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, which is an unusual arrangement between a government and a set of private companies.

Enforcement has been busiest at the hardware end. Taiwanese prosecutors have detained an Nvidia employee in a chip-smuggling investigation, and Super Micro’s co-founder has been charged over server exports to China.

Ding’s case was the intellectual property version of the same anxiety, and the part that has now collapsed is precisely the part that made it geopolitical. Without the espionage counts it is a theft case, serious but ordinary.

His lawyer welcomed the ruling. The Justice Department and Google did not immediately comment, and neither has said whether an appeal is planned.

Prosecutors can appeal a post-verdict acquittal of this kind, though the standard is demanding, because the judge is finding that no reasonable jury could have reached the conclusion on the evidence presented.

Sentencing is set for 1 September, but Ding still faces up to 10 years on each of seven counts, which in practice will turn on how the guidelines treat the value of what was taken and whether the court finds he intended to use it commercially.

The ruling does not vindicate him, and it does not exonerate Google’s security posture either. It says only that the government proved a theft and did not prove a state.

The case also says something about how these prosecutions are built. Intent to benefit a foreign government is usually proved through communications, payments, or a documented relationship, and the jury convicted without the judge being satisfied that any of that had been established.

Linwei Ding had been accused of connections to Chinese technology companies rather than to the state itself, which is the gap the ruling turns on. A commercial recipient in China is not the government of China, however uncomfortable the distinction is for prosecutors.

Google’s position is unchanged either way. The company detected the exfiltration, reported it, and testified, and the material is still gone regardless of which statute applies.

For the Justice Department, the timing is awkward. It has been building a case in public that AI trade secret theft is a national security matter rather than a commercial dispute, and a judge has just drawn that line somewhere the department did not want it.