A Chinese software engineer who worked for Alphabet Inc.’s Google faces new charges of economic espionage by the US Justice Department for allegedly stealing trade secrets to boost China’s AI industry. Linwei Ding, who was indicted in March, now faces seven counts of economic espionage along with seven counts of theft of trade secrets under a revised indictment announced Tuesday. Donald Trump vowed during his campaign for president to “curtail China’s ability to conduct espionage” targeting the US military and other prized technology. Last week, a former Senior Adviser for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was arrested on US charges of conspiring to steal government trade secrets to benefit China. Ding, a Chinese national who joined Google in 2019 and also goes by Leon Ding, allegedly stole technology involving the Alphabet Inc. unit’s home-grown chip that the search giant uses to train its AI models, such as Gemini, and graphical processing units. He pleaded not guilty to the original charges in March. He founded a startup in 2023 in China and also applied to a Shanghai-based “talent program” that offers monetary rewards to people who bring technical know-how back to China after doing research and development overseas, according to the indictment.

Full story : Former Google engineer Linwei Ding faces new charges of economic espionage by the US DOJ for allegedly stealing trade secrets to boost China’s AI industry.