Electrical – Is it acceptable to use a ground wire from one outlet to ground another

I've had some issues with AFICs in the past, and one quick thing you should check (which ended up being my problem): Is the insulation on the wire coming into the outlet box pinched and causing a loose/flaky connection? That will still give power to the outlet (under a normal breaker) and won't trip a normal breaker, but it'll drive an AFCI nuts.

Another technique you can try to debug this is by swapping in a GFCI breaker, and see if that trips too. If the GFCI trips, it's a grounding problem. If it only trips on the AFCI, then there's arcing somewhere along the circuit. Check junction boxes, the outlet boxes and the connections to the plugs in the boxes.

Happy & Safe Debugging!

It is NOT safe to obtain the grounding from another outlet.

The grounding wire must follow along side the hot and neutral wires of the same circuit for the entire path back to the panel. The reason for this is to minimize the inductance in the event of a short circuit to any grounded metal, either in work boxes, or in the powered equipment itself (such as the multi-outlet box). Surge protection will be much less effective in cases where the surge is a differential between hot/neutral and ground (which actually is a common type of surge) due to this same inductance.

Inductance is minimized when the wires with the current going in both directions are close together. Their magnetic fields overlap and mostly cancel each other out (there will be a field inside the cable between the wires). When the wires are far apart, their magnetic fields will extend a greater distance and there will be more inductance. Also, metal located inside the "loop" between the wires can be affected by the magnetics (sometimes in a hazardous way).

To correctly upgrade a 2-wire circuit to 2-wire-plus-ground circuit, the cable must be replaced with one that has integrated ground. In some rare cases, the proper cable may have been run, already, but an ungrounded outlet was used.

Simply running a single wire along side the old cable is also NOT safe. The wires of a circuit, when conducting current, will try to physically move apart from each other due to the orientation of the magnetic field. Physically binding the new single wire to the cable with cable ties not further than 6 inches apart for the entire length could avoid that issue (but is still not code compliant). If you are doing that much work, just replace the cable with the proper type. FYI, this was one of the hazards of older knob and tube wiring. Single wires inside conduit are known to move around, but the conduit sufficiently confines the movement so all you get is some noise.

In many cases you can obtain much (but not all) of the safety of grounding with the use of a GFCI outlet. The grounding wire still cannot be used in this case. It just gives a safer 2-wire load. It is not sufficiently safe for appliances that have frequent human contact, like a computer.