The State Department rolled out measures targeting Shanghai Zhisuan Technology Co., and separately named MiraclePlus and three related entities for backing Zhisuan at the seed stage. The package can include freezing assets held in the US and restricting access to American banking.
Launched in 2023, Zhisuan builds a software platform to support training of AI models. Its founder, former Google software engineer Ding Linwei, was convicted this year of taking Google AI trade secrets and received a one-year jail sentence in September.
After his January conviction, the Justice Department said Ding had quietly linked himself to two AI companies in China while still at Google. According to prosecutors, he placed over 2,000 pages of proprietary trade-secret material into a personal cloud account and, fewer than two weeks before his December 2023 resignation, also transferred files to his own computer. His defense argued the materials did not qualify as trade secrets and said prosecutors did not prove he intended to use them to benefit his company or China.
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According to the State Department, Ding submitted Zhisuan to MiraclePlus's startup incubator and pitched his familiarity with Google technology. MiraclePlus is led by Lu Qi, a former Microsoft executive recruited by Baidu in 2017 to lead its AI efforts before departing a year later for personal reasons.
In 2018, Lu joined Y Combinator, brought in by then-President Sam Altman to help build YC China. A year later, when YC halted the expansion, Lu and his team moved forward independently as MiraclePlus. Among its notable China bets are SiliconFlow, an AI inference platform, and AgiBot, a robotics company; both are weighing listings in Hong Kong. MiraclePlus representatives did not immediately respond to emailed and messaged requests for comment.
Sanctions that can lock up US assets and limit banking access raise funding and liquidity risks for the named firms and their portfolio companies. If you have exposure to MiraclePlus-backed startups such as SiliconFlow or AgiBot, or to Shanghai Zhisuan via private vehicles, watch for potential knock-on effects on capital access and any listing plans.
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