A Judge Threw Out Seven Economic-Espionage Convictions Against an Ex-Google Engineer. Seven Theft Convictions Survived.

On 20 August, US District Judge Vince Chhabria of the Northern District of California entered a post-verdict judgment of acquittal on all seven economic-espionage counts against former Google engineer Linwei Ding, finding the government had not proved he intended or knew his conduct would benefit the government of China. All seven theft-of-trade-secrets convictions stand. A jury had convicted on all fourteen counts in January after an eleven-day trial. The material at issue was confidential documentation of the hardware and software of Google's supercomputing data centres used to train large AI models.

Two statutes, one set of facts

The distinction is statutory. Section 1831 — economic espionage — requires that the theft be intended to benefit a foreign government, and carries up to fifteen years per count. Section 1832 — theft of trade secrets — requires only intent to benefit someone other than the owner, and carries up to ten years. Chhabria had already refused acquittal on the 1832 counts in an earlier order, writing that it is irrelevant whether anyone actually received a benefit: what matters is what Ding intended.

What the common framing gets wrong

"Conviction overturned" is wrong three ways. Half of it was overturned: Ding remains a convicted federal felon on seven counts and is sentenced on 1 September. It was not an appeal — no appellate court has touched this case; the same trial judge who presided over the jury granted a Rule 29 motion. And the government is not out of options: a judgment of acquittal entered after a guilty verdict is one of the narrow circumstances in which prosecutors may appeal without a double-jeopardy bar, because reversal would reinstate the jury's verdict rather than require a retrial. Finally, the ruling says nothing about whether Ding took the files. The court left that finding entirely undisturbed.

Why the element failed

Nothing at trial connected Ding's China-side contacts to the Chinese state. Section 1831 has been the Justice Department's signature charge in technology-transfer cases, and this was its marquee AI-era prosecution — Google's TPU and data-centre stack. A judge finding the state-benefit element unproven after a government trial win raises the practical evidentiary bar for every future case prosecutors want to badge as espionage rather than ordinary theft.