A federal jury in San Francisco on Thursday convicted a former Google software engineer of stealing trade secrets related to the search company’s artificial intelligence technology.

The jury found 38-year-old Ding Linwei, also known as Leon Ding, guilty of seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets in connection with the theft of thousands of pages of confidential information from Google to benefit the People’s Republic of China, the court said. document.

“In today’s high-stakes race for dominance in artificial intelligence, Linwei Ding betrayed the United States and his employer by stealing trade secrets about Google’s artificial intelligence technology on behalf of the Chinese government,” said Roman Rozhavsky, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division. statement Friday. “Today’s sentencing affirms that federal laws will be enforced to protect our nation’s most valuable technologies and hold accountable those who steal them.”

The case marks the first U.S. conviction for artificial intelligence-related economic espionage, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Google Executives and U.S. Leaders vocal music Regarding the artificial intelligence arms race, especially the artificial intelligence arms race between the United States and China. Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind recently told CNBC China’s artificial intelligence models may lag “months” behind U.S. and Western capabilities.

The jury’s decision came after Ding was initially sued 2024. Thursday’s ruling came after U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria of the Northern District of California oversaw an 11-day trial.

The U.S. Department of Justice said on Friday that between May 2022 and April 2023, Ding stole more than 2,000 pages of Google artificial intelligence trade secrets and uploaded them to his personal Google Cloud account. At the time, Ding had been affiliated with two Chinese technology companies and was in the process of creating his own technology company.

The trade secrets include details about Google’s custom Tensor Processing Unit chips and the company’s Graphics Processing Unit system architecture, according to the Justice Department. The trade secrets also include details about Google’s custom SmartNIC, a specialized network interface card that enables high-speed communications between its artificial intelligence supercomputers and cloud network systems.

Ding’s attorney Grant Fondo It is said Think Google is not doing enough to protect information. He argued that the documents in question were available to thousands of employees and therefore could not have contained trade secrets, adding that “Google chose openness over security,” Court News Service reported.

Ding, whose next court date is Tuesday, could face up to 10 years in prison on each count of trade secret theft and up to 15 years in prison on each count of economic espionage, according to the Justice Department.

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