Judge acquits ex-Google engineer of economic espionage in AI secrets case

A San Francisco jury convicted former Google engineer Linwei Ding on 14 counts — seven for trade secret theft, seven for economic espionage — after he uploaded roughly 1,255 internal documents to a personal cloud account while allegedly building a rival company in China.

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria let the theft convictions stand, calling the government's evidence of intent 'overwhelming.' But he tossed the economic espionage counts, ruling prosecutors never showed Ding intended to benefit the Chinese government at the time he uploaded the files — only that he pursued Chinese business ties months later.

Chhabria described Ding's efforts as 'ad hoc, disorganized and feeble,' not the work of a sophisticated foreign operative, and noted the government tried to salvage the case with a legal theory it never presented to the jury. Because double jeopardy bars a retrial on those counts, acquittal — not a new trial — is mandatory. Ding is set to be sentenced September 1 on what remains.

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