Peter Williams stole a U.S. defense contractor's trade secrets about highly sensitive cyber capabilities and sold them to a broker whose clients include the Russian government, putting our national security and countless potential victims at risk.
"As part of the alleged scheme to commit trade secret theft, the defendants used their employment to obtain access to confidential and sensitive information," the DoJ said in a press release. "The defendants then exfiltrated confidential and sensitive documents, including trade secrets related to processor security and cryptography and other technologies, from Google and other technology companies to unauthorized third-party and personal locations, including to work devices associated with each other's employers, and to Iran."
A former Google software engineer has been convicted of stealing AI hardware secrets from the company for the benefit of two China-based firms, one of which he founded. The second startup intended to use these secrets to market its technology to PRC-controlled organizations. On Thursday, Linwei ("Leon") Ding, 38, was convicted on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of trade secret theft for stealing confidential information related to Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), and SmartNIC network interface cards.
