Regulation 2026-08-22

A jury said he spied for China. The judge says nobody proved it, and threw out all seven espionage counts.

US District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco has vacated all seven economic espionage convictions against Linwei Ding, the former Google engineer found guilty in January of taking confidential material on the chips and data-centre systems Google uses to train its AI models. The seven trade-secret theft convictions stand. Chhabria ruled there was ample evidence that Ding took the files, but not enough to show he knew or intended that his actions would benefit the Chinese government, which is what the economic espionage statute requires. Prosecutors said Ding began copying internal documents in May 2022, moved more than 2,000 pages to personal cloud accounts while masking the activity, and was at the same time in talks to become chief technology officer of one Chinese company and acting chief executive of another he was founding. Each espionage count carried up to 15 years; the theft counts he still faces carry up to 10 each. Sentencing is set for 1 September.

Why it mattersThis is the first real test of what American prosecutors can actually prove when they charge AI hardware secrets as spying rather than as ordinary theft. Taking the files was provable. The step from he took it to he took it for Beijing was not, and a judge has now said so in the government's highest-profile AI case. Since the Ding indictment, the espionage framing has been used repeatedly in matters involving semiconductors and model infrastructure, and companies have leaned on it when arguing for export controls and tighter internal security. The ruling does not free him and probably does not keep him out of prison. It does say the intent has to be shown rather than inferred from whom the defendant was talking to.

✓ Verified · 4 sources

Read in the app — free, in 9 languages

Software decided which drivers lost their livelihood. The bill for that decision is 825 million euros.
2026-08-22 Nevada just cleared up to 8,000 driverless taxis for Las Vegas — Tesla's ceiling went from 10 to 5,000 in five weeks
2026-08-21 OpenAI has started a team whose stated worry is that a company like OpenAI ends up with too much power
2026-08-21 OpenAI says it can police misuse without keeping your company's data — and it is pointing at Anthropic while saying so
2026-08-20 A Florida officer ran his ex-wife's plate 717 times. A Kansas city has just switched its cameras off.
2026-08-20

A jury said he spied for China. The judge says nobody proved it, and threw out all seven espionage counts.

Related stories