The high-stakes world of artificial intelligence just saw its first major criminal reckoning in a San Francisco courtroom. On Thursday, a federal jury found 38-year-old Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, guilty on fourteen total counts—seven for economic espionage and seven for the theft of trade secrets.
This wasn’t just a simple case of a disgruntled employee taking files on his way out the door; it was a systematic, year-long effort to siphon the “brains” of Google’s supercomputing power for the benefit of the Chinese government.
During the eleven-day trial, prosecutors painted a picture of a man living a double life. While Ding was officially drawing a paycheck from Google, he was secretly building a parallel career in the People’s Republic of China…