The U.S. Department of Justice issued an announcement on the 13th stating that a Saudi engineer at OpenAI has been arrested and charged with "illegal interception of oral communications" for allegedly secretly installing a hidden recording device in an executive conference room at the San Francisco office. The 35-year-old engineer is named Abdulrahman Alfozan. He was apprehended on the 9th of this month and has worked at OpenAI since the 7th month of 2025; if convicted, he faces up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000 (approximately RMB 167.6万元).
As disclosed, OpenAI's security team found the device on September 30 in an executive conference room in one of the office buildings — it was stuffed inside toilet paper, plugged into the USB port on the back of the conference room's television, and had been installed around September 28, containing encrypted data. The conference room is normally used to discuss highly confidential matters such as proprietary research, product planning, technical capabilities, business relationships, and even government cooperation, and surveillance showed that although Alfozan was seen lingering nearby multiple times, he had no authorization to attend the meetings held there.
Using AI Tools for Reconnaissance, Spouse's Account for Eavesdropping Questions
The indictment outlines an even more meticulous scheme: Alfozan also used a productivity tool to look up the company's offices, conference rooms, executive locations, and meeting schedules; a chatbot account associated with his spouse was used to inquire about continuous recording, modifying Wi-Fi, real-time eavesdropping, and encrypted SD cards. The Department of Justice noted that the prompts submitted by that account between September 27 and 28 already involved custom headers and a unique MAC address for the device involved; in footage from October 5, he even returned to the conference room to look behind the television.
OpenAI has fired the employee and referred the matter to the FBI. The company also stated that there is currently no indication that he improperly accessed or leaked model weights, source code, or customer data — although the secret recordings have not been proven to have caused the outflow of core assets, the fact that an engineer could plant a listening device in the giant's core area is startling enough.