Linwei Ding, the founder of Zhisuan and a former Google employee, was sentenced to 12 months minus 1 day in prison after a judge overturned seven economic espionage charges while upholding seven counts of trade secret theft. The current sanctions do not personally target founder Lu Qi or other MiraclePlus management, but they create compliance risks for portfolio companies including AgiBot and SiliconFlow. Under OFAC rules, any company at least 50% owned by the sanctioned entities is subject to an automatic asset freeze.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
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US Sanctions Lu Qi's MiraclePlus for Google AI Secrets Theft
Geopolitics13 hours ago
The US government has frozen assets of four firms under the MiraclePlus umbrella after an ex-Google engineer pitched the incubator on his ability to copy proprietary AI systems. The US Treasury and the Office of Foreign Assets Control also blacklisted the startup Shanghai Zhisuan Technology as part of a five-entity sanction list issued under the Protecting American Intellectual Property Act of 2022. The targets are accused of providing material support for the theft of more than 2,000 pages of confidential documents concerning Google's TPU and GPU supercomputing infrastructure.
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