The US sanctions MiraclePlus, the Beijing investor that backed a convicted ex-Google engineer's startup

State says Ding pitched MiraclePlus on copying Google's AI infrastructure for China, and the incubator paid for a stake.

By Think Facility · October 20, 2026 · Google AI policy

On October 19, 2026, the State Department sanctioned five Chinese entities tied to Linwei Ding, the former Google engineer a federal jury convicted in January of stealing Google's AI secrets. Two of the names matter most. One is Shanghai Zhisuan Technology, the company Ding set up in 2023. The other is MiraclePlus, a Beijing startup investor that put seed money into it.

The remaining three are funds MiraclePlus manages or owns. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control put all five on its sanctions list the same day, under a 2022 law written for trade secret theft.

Who acted: State Department, with Treasury's OFAC
Targets: five China-based entities
Law: Protecting American Intellectual Property Act
Tied to: Linwei Ding, convicted January 29, 2026
Announced: October 19, 2026

What Ding took

According to the Justice Department, between about May 2022 and April 2023, while he still worked at Google, Ding uploaded more than two thousand pages of confidential AI material to his personal Google Cloud account. On January 29, 2026, a jury found him guilty of seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets.

A green circuit board seen from above, with four chip packages under metal heat spreaders and red, blue, yellow and green coolant hoses running to a manifold on one side — Google's TPU v4 board, with four liquid-cooled chip packages. The secrets Ding stole covered Google's TPU chips and the software that links them. Photo: Norman P. Jouppi, George Kurian, Sheng Li, Peter Ma, Rahul Nagarajan, Lifeng Nai, Nishant Patil, Suvinay Subramanian, Andy Swing, Brian Towles, Cliff Young, Xiang Zhou, Zongwei Zhou, and David…, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The material was about the plumbing behind Google's AI: its Tensor Processing Unit chips, its GPU systems, and the software that turns thousands of chips into one supercomputer for training models. He faces up to 10 years in prison on each theft count and 15 on each espionage count, though the court sets the actual sentence.

Why the investor is on the list

The State Department's fact sheet tells it like this. Ding applied to MiraclePlus's startup program on Zhisuan's behalf, selling his knowledge of Google's internal systems and claiming Zhisuan could copy Google's infrastructure. MiraclePlus took a stake in exchange for seed capital, and Ding then pitched the company on the stage MiraclePlus gave him.

touted his connection to Google technology and his ability to replicate its technology to fit China’s national conditions

Imposing Sanctions to Protect Americans from Intellectual Property Theft Fact Sheet - United States Department of State

The legal finding against MiraclePlus is that it gave significant support to the theft or benefited significantly from it. State doesn't say which (the statute covers both). It doesn't accuse the firm of knowing the technology was stolen, either.

One wording change stands out. State's release calls Ding's haul trade secrets related to "super intelligence (SI) technology." The Justice Department's own release from January said artificial intelligence. The administration has been swapping one term for the other, which we covered in September.

What it means for investors and banks

These aren't symbolic listings. OFAC's entries block all five entities' property and bar transactions with them, apart from importing goods. US banks can't lend any of them more than $10 million in any 12-month period, and Americans can't buy significant amounts of their equity or debt.

So anyone in the US with money tied up alongside MiraclePlus funds has a problem to sort out. OFAC issued a general license for winding down transactions with the entities blocked on October 19, which is the route out for a fund or bank that already has dealings with them. A second license covers transactions allowed under its cyber-related sanctions rules.

I think the choice of target is the part startups in China will notice. Sanctioning the company built on stolen code is expected. Going after the incubator that funded it reaches a step further back, to whoever paid for the pitch.

The law itself is young. PAIPA was signed in January 2023, and it requires sanctions on foreign people and firms that commit or benefit from significant theft of US trade secrets. The State Department says this kind of theft costs US industry billions of dollars a year and harms American jobs.

What hasn't been said

MiraclePlus's English site had no statement on the sanctions when we checked it on October 20, 2026, and we found no response from Zhisuan. The fact sheet names no other startup MiraclePlus has backed.