The action follows the January conviction of Linwei Ding, a former Google engineer who pleaded guilty to 7 counts of economic espionage and 7 counts of trade secret theft after uploading more than 2,000 pages of internal files on TPU and GPU systems to a personal cloud account. While the US sanctioned the funds that provided seed capital to Ding's startup, it did not sanction MiraclePlus founder Lu Qi or other management. Portfolio companies of the sanctioned entities now face higher compliance risks, as those with 50% or more ownership by the frozen subjects are subject to automatic freezes.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
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US Sanctions Top China AI Incubator MiraclePlus for Google Theft
Geopolitics1 day ago
The Office of Foreign Assets Control has blacklisted five firms and funds in October for supporting economic espionage targeting artificial intelligence hardware and software. The Treasury Department froze assets and restricted banking and investment transactions for four entities under the umbrella of MiraclePlus, a prominent Chinese AI incubator, and the startup Shanghai Zhisuan Technology. These sanctions, issued under the Protecting American Intellectual Property Act of 2022, target those who provided material support for the theft of proprietary technology from Google.
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