US sanctions 5 Chinese entities over ex-Google engineer’s AI trade secrets theft

On Monday, the US State Department announced a series of sanctions targeting five Chinese entities accused of stealing trade secrets from American companies, particularly from Google. The entities under scrutiny include Shanghai Zhisuan Technology, founded by ex-Google engineer Ding Linwei, venture capital firm MiraclePlus and three additional related companies.

Ding was convicted of seven counts of trade secret theft in January, though he was acquitted on seven more counts of economic espionage due to insufficient evidence. The theft convictions remain active. The indictment accused Ding of stealing confidential Google code related to the company's AI supercomputing infrastructure, including technical details of tensor processing units (TPUs), graphics processing unit (GPU) systems and networking components used for training and deploying large-scale AI models.

These technologies, crucial for China's AI industry due to export controls on high-performance chips, pose a significant barrier to developing super intelligence (SI). A superseding indictment in February 2025 detailed how Ding secretly uploaded over 1,000 Google files to his personal cloud account between May 2022 and May 2023.

He had founded technology companies in China without Google's knowledge, pitching his expertise in Google's computing platform technology to potential investors. Ding resigned from Google in late 2023 before his arrest in March 2024 in San Francisco. In August, a federal judge ruled that prosecutors failed to prove Ding intended his actions to benefit China, overturning the economic espionage charges while keeping the trade secret theft convictions.

He was sentenced to 12 months in prison minus one day and fined around US$198,000. The sanctions, under the Protecting American Intellectual Property Act (PAIPA), cut off the sanctioned entities from US financial and commercial transactions.