A former Google engineer has been sentenced to nearly one year in prison for stealing AI trade secrets from Google to benefit two Chinese companies, according to a Bloomberg report.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria sentenced Linwei Ding to 12 months minus one day at a hearing on Tuesday. The judge said the federal sentencing guideline's recommendations of up to six months did not capture the severity of the conduct.
The judge also ordered Ding to pay a fine of $2,500 and over $198,000 in restitution to Google, according to a report from Courthouse News Service.
Prosecutors had sought a sentence of 70 months in prison, while Ding's attorney had requested a sentence of three months' home confinement.
"This was a systematic, brazen effort to steal Google’s property and to benefit himself with it," the judge said Tuesday, according to Courthouse News. "He knew very well what he was doing and he hurt people along the way. He hurt Google along the way; he hurt his intern, his family and numerous times he tried to avoid detection."
Ding was first indicted in March 2024 on four counts of trade secrets theft. A superseding indictment in February 2025 expanded the charges, according to a Department of Justice statement last year.
Google hired Ding as a software engineer in 2019 to develop AI infrastructure, and between May 2022 and May 2023, he uploaded over 1,000 files containing confidential information from the tech giant to his personal Google Cloud account, according to prosecutors.
While still at Google, Ding was in discussions with an early-stage Chinese company in June 2022 to serve as the chief technology officer. Later in May 2023, he founded his own technology company focused on AI and machine learning in China.
Prosecutors alleged that Ding had intended to benefit the Chinese government by stealing AI trade secrets from Google. Specifically, he allegedly stole confidential information related to hardware and software that powers Google's data centers to train AI models.
The judge tossed the charges of economic espionage last month, ruling that there was insufficient evidence that Ding intended to benefit the Chinese government.