IT之家 October 14 news — According to Reuters, the U.S. Department of Justice said locally on Tuesday that federal agents arrested a Saudi engineer employed at OpenAI, accusing him of installing a concealed recording device in an executive conference room at the artificial intelligence company.
In a statement, the U.S. Department of Justice said 35-year-old Abdulrahman Alfozan had worked as an engineer at OpenAI since 7/2025.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, on September 30, OpenAI discovered the recording device plugged into a USB port behind a television in an executive conference room at one of its office buildings in San Francisco.
An FBI complaint shows that this USB-stick-sized device had a microphone and could also be connected to an external camera, and was hidden inside toilet paper. The device was installed around September 28, and the data stored inside was encrypted and could not be read directly. Investigators later seized another custom device of the same kind from Alfozan's personal bag.
OpenAI said in a post on the X platform that the company used internal AI models to identify the person responsible for placing the device and traced the device's origin.
The company said evidence shows the employee intended to install more recording devices in multiple sensitive areas of the office to secretly record meeting content.
The company said: "There is currently no indication that this person improperly accessed or stole model weights, source code, or customer data. The employee has been terminated."
OpenAI referred the case to the FBI, and the investigation is ongoing.
FBI Director Kash Patel said in a statement: "Abdulrahman Alfozan is accused of hiding a secret recording device in his employer's executive conference room and secretly recording sensitive conversations related to the company's superintelligence technology."
The FBI complaint shows that for about a month until 9/16, Alfozan also used an AI office assistant to query conference room schedules and related permission information. He has held U.S. lawful permanent resident status since 9/2020.
If convicted, Alfozan faces up to five years in prison, a fine of $250,000 (IT之家 note: about 1.676 million yuan at the current exchange rate), and three years of supervised release.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Alfozan studied at MIT and the University of California, Berkeley, and previously worked at Meta and Microsoft.
OpenAI said locally last Friday that an investigation found three researchers had violated the company's sensitive information management rules, and the three have been dismissed. The three researchers are Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni. The three subsequently published an open letter detailing the circumstances of their dismissals, arguing that the sudden firings would unsettle employees and damage the internal culture of researchers raising safety risk concerns.