If you’ve ever wondered how America’s greatest technological breakthroughs end up powering China’s military and surveillance state, look no further than the smiling face of Linwei Ding — or as he tried to rebrand himself, “Leon.” This former Google engineer just got convicted on 14 counts of espionage and theft of trade secrets, and not for snagging a few PowerPoint slides. We’re talking over 2,000 pages of Google’s top-secret AI blueprints — the kind of stuff that powers next-gen supercomputers, not your Roomba.
Between May 2022 and April 2023, Ding was living the Silicon Valley dream: six-figure salary, access to cutting-edge AI research, and apparently a side hustle in high-tech treason. While cashing paychecks from Google, he was secretly laying the groundwork to become the CEO of his own AI company in China — and not just any startup. He pitched it to investors by bragging that he could replicate Google’s supercomputing tech. Because nothing says “entrepreneurial spirit” like corporate espionage.
According to the Department of Justice, this guy wasn’t just copying code. He was lifting the crown jewels of Google’s AI empire — proprietary hardware designs, software platforms, and the orchestration tech that ties it all together. We’re talking Tensor Processing Units, GPU systems, SmartNICs, and the software that turns thousands of chips into a digital brain capable of training massive AI models. In other words, this guy didn’t just steal the car — he took the engine, the blueprints, and the keys.
So how did he get away with it for so long? Let’s ask the geniuses at Google’s HR department and the federal bureaucrats who rubber-stamp H-1B visas like they’re handing out Halloween candy. Ding wasn’t just stealing secrets while on the clock — he was actively negotiating with Chinese tech firms, planning to become a CTO in the People’s Republic, and setting up his own company on the side. All while waltzing around Mountain View with access to one of the most sensitive AI infrastructures in the world. But sure, tell us again how diversity is our greatest strength.
And where was the FBI while this was all happening? Busy labeling parents at school board meetings as domestic terrorists while a digital Benedict Arnold was uploading classified material to his personal Google Cloud account. You could call it incompetence, but at this point, “national security malpractice” might be more accurate.
Former Google software engineer convicted of AI espionage, trade secret theft https://t.co/BqFy1oD10U pic.twitter.com/zuaeuvjkLz
— New York Post (@nypost) January 30, 2026
Now that Trump is back in the Oval Office, you’d think we’d finally see some real consequences. Maybe it’s time to revisit the whole H-1B visa system — you know, the one that lets foreign nationals from adversarial nations stroll into America’s most sensitive tech firms with a badge and a smile. Because if this case proves anything, it’s that we’re still wide open — not just to competition, but to infiltration.
Linwei Ding is facing serious prison time, and he deserves every second. But the bigger question is how many more Dings are still out there — quietly siphoning off American innovation to the highest bidder, all under the noses of corporate executives and federal agencies too distracted or too afraid to ask tough questions.
If we don’t get serious about espionage from the inside, we won’t need to worry about China stealing the future — we’ll just hand it to them, one Google Drive folder at a time.