State Department sanctions five China-based entities tied to ex-Google engineer Linwei Ding's trade-secret theft

The US State Department has designated five China-based entities under the Protecting American Intellectual Property Act (PAIPA) in connection with the theft of Google’s AI trade secrets by former Google engineer Linwei Ding. The fact sheet, dated 19 October, names them as:

1. Shanghai Zhisuan Technology Co Ltd (Zhisuan), which State says Ding established in 2023.
2. Qiji Chuangtan Beijing Investment Management Co Ltd (MiraclePlus), a venture capital firm that, per State, gave Zhisuan seed capital for an ownership stake.
3. Beijing Qiji Chuangtan Phase I Venture Capital Center Limited Partnership (Phase I), a fund managed by MiraclePlus.
4. Beijing Qiji Chuangtan Phase II Venture Capital Center Limited Partnership (Phase II), a fund managed by MiraclePlus.
5. Beijing Qiji Chuangtan Zhiyuan Enterprise Management Center Limited Partnership (Zhiyuan Enterprise), which State says is wholly owned by Phase I.

OFAC added all five to its Non-SDN Menu-Based Sanctions List the same day and issued two PAIPA general licenses.

What State says happened

According to the fact sheet, Zhisuan was marketed as able to build a software platform to accelerate machine-learning workloads, including training “large super intelligence (SI) models.” Ding applied on Zhisuan’s behalf to MiraclePlus’s startup incubation program, “touting his experience with and knowledge of Google’s technology and internal systems and claiming that Zhisuan could replicate Google’s SI infrastructure technology.”

State’s legal findings differ by entity. It says Zhisuan “knowingly engaged in, or benefitted from, significant theft of trade secrets” of US persons. It says MiraclePlus provided “significant financial, material, or technological support” for that theft, and that the three partnerships are owned or controlled by, or acted for, MiraclePlus. The designations apply sanctions under section 2(b)(1)(A), (D), (H), (I) and (J) of the statute. The fact sheet names no other companies, and this designation says nothing about other startups MiraclePlus has funded.

The criminal case behind it

The fact sheet does not restate Ding’s conviction, so here is the record. A San Francisco jury convicted Ding on 29 January 2026 on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets, the Justice Department said. The trade secrets concerned the hardware and software behind Google’s AI supercomputing data centers, including its TPU systems.

On 20 August, Judge Vince Chhabria acquitted Ding on the seven economic espionage counts. He found the evidence too thin to show that, when Ding uploaded the documents, he “already intended or knew that his conduct would benefit the Chinese government.” The seven trade-secret convictions stand. Bloomberg Law reported that on 1 September he was sentenced to 12 months minus one day.

Why it matters

PAIPA, signed into law in January 2023, “mandates sanctions” against certain foreign persons who engage in or benefit from significant theft of US persons’ trade secrets, State says. These designations use it on the startup and on the investor behind it, separately from the criminal case against the engineer. They are the first PAIPA designations tied to AI-lab trade secrets that we have seen.