U.S. Sanctions Five Chinese Entities Linked to Google AI Trade Secret Theft

The U.S. has sanctioned a startup and a venture capital firm from China connected to Linwei Ding, a Chinese national and former Google software engineer sentenced to prison last month for stealing Google’s AI-related trade secrets.

The startup, Shanghai Zhisuan Technology, is an AI company Ding founded in 2023, while the other four sanctioned entities are associated with MiraclePlus, a Beijing-based venture capital firm and startup incubator. Ding, through his startup, applied to MiraclePlus’s incubator program and claimed that his company could replicate Google’s AI infrastructure technology, the State Department said on Monday.

MiraclePlus was established in 2018 as Y Combinator’s China arm and later became independent after Y Combinator left China. It was sanctioned by the U.S. for benefitting from or supporting the theft of trade secrets from US entities.

The five entities’ addition to the Treasury Department’s sanctions list blocks their properties in the U.S. and prohibits U.S. banks and investors from transacting with them.

Ding was convicted in January for stealing thousands of pages of confidential information containing Google’s trade secrets. The case attracted widespread attention in the tech industry due to growing AI rivalry between the U.S. and China.