Record / data breach · United States · 2026-09-26

Ex-Google engineer convicted of stealing AI supercomputing trade secrets

data breachAI eraactor: Linwei Ding (insider)confidence 95named

Between about May 2022 and April 2023, a Google software engineer uploaded more than 2,000 pages of confidential AI infrastructure material to a personal Google Cloud account while secretly tied to two China-based tech companies. The material covered Google's TPU and GPU systems, the software that runs them as AI supercomputers, and a custom SmartNIC. He was charged in March 2024 and a federal jury convicted him in January 2026.

Organization
Google · google.com
Country · sector
United States · Technology
Dates
occurred – · disclosed 2024-03-06 · published 2026-09-26
Tags
model-theft, ai-era

Sources

Defenses for this class of incident

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A data breach sits in these classes of the AI-security landscape. The companies below work on that class of problem. This is a taxonomy, not a claim that any of them would have changed this incident.

HeimWall Operator
AI data governance
United States · est. 2025
AI identityAI data governance
Israel · est. 2014 · raised $100M
AI data governanceAI identity
United States · est. 2019 · raised $100M
AI data governance
United States · est. 2025
Model security
United States · est. 2020 · raised $131M

Vendor data: AI Security Startups Map by Prompt Security (CC BY 4.0), synced daily. startups.prompt.security. Paid placements are labelled Sponsored; HeimWall, which runs this site, is labelled Operator. 453 companies in the directory.

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