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.
