Ex-Google employees charged for ‘stealing trade secrets’ around Pixel’s Tensor chip

Ben Schoon | Feb 20 2026 - 2:50 pm PT

US courts have charged three individuals, including two ex-Google employees, regarding the theft of trade secrets in regards to Google’s efforts with Tensor chips in Pixel phones.

In a US court case (USA v. Ghandali, 26-cr-00071), three individuals have been charged with 14 felony counts of conspiracy and theft of trade secrets, as well as destroying evidence. There’s, of course, no word on what in particular was stolen.

Bloomberg reports:

The three… were charged in a US indictment unsealed Thursday on 14 felony counts of conspiracy and theft of trade secrets and destroying evidence.

Two of the three – Samaneh Ghandali and her sister, Soroor Ghandali – were formerly Google employees. Samaneh was a hardware engineer at Google while Soroor was an intern. Both went on to work at a different tech company later on. Samaneh’s husband, Mohammadjavad Khosravi, was also charged in the case and worked at yet another tech company, but had applied to work at Google multiple times.

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A Google spokesperson said in a statement:

We have enhanced safeguards to protect our confidential information and immediately alerted law enforcement after discovering this incident. Today’s indictments are an important step towards accountability and we’ll continue working to ensure our trade secrets remain secure.

This certainly isn’t the first time we’ve seen action taken around confidential information with Tensor. An intentional leak of a slide deck in 2024 revealed quite a few details about what would become Tensor G5 and a future Tensor G6 chipset, and Google later sued the leaker.

The consequences of this case, though, may be considerably more, as the three individuals charged could face “at least” 20 years in prison if “convicted on the most serious charges.”

H/T Droid-Life