Here’s yet another example of the insider threat, and this time, Google was the victim.
Isaiah Poritz reports that after a criminal trial in federal court in the Northern District of California, Linwei Ding has been found guilty of 14 counts of economic espionage and trade secrets theft.
Ding, also known as Leon Ding, was employed as an engineer by Google. He reportedly stole hundreds of documents on AI chip technology to build his own startup in China. He allegedly began transferring thousands of internal Google documents in May 2022, copying them into his Apple Notes App and then converting them to PDF files, which he uploaded to a personal cloud account. Ding reportedly transferred 1,255 documents, totaling an estimated 14,000 pages, over the course of one year.
At the time of his arrest in March 2024, Ding was charged with four counts of theft of trade secrets. A superseding indictment in February of 2025 added additional charges, and a second superseding indictment expanded the dates of his alleged crimes from May 2022 to January 2024.
The case is USA v. Ding, N.D. Cal., No. 3:24-cr-00141, 1/29/26.