Former OpenAI employee, Saudi national, indicted for allegedly bugging OpenAI conference room
A Saudi national was arrested and charged after allegedly planting a recording device at an OpenAI office in San Francisco, authorities said Tuesday.
Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, was arrested last week. Security footage captured Alfozan several times near the executive conference room before the device was discovered, although he had no authorization to access the space or attend meetings there, federal prosecutors said.
“The FBI and its partners arrested this individual after he allegedly hid a recording device in his employer’s executive conference room to secretly capture sensitive communications about the company’s super intelligence technology,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on X. “Protecting American IS innovation is critically important and the FBI considers it one of our highest counterintelligence priorities.”
Alfozan had been employed by OpenAI since July 2025. Around September 30, someone discovered a clandestine audio recording device inserted into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room inside an OpenAI building in San Francisco, according to a federal complaint.
The company later determined that the device, hidden in toilet paper, had been installed two days before its discovery and that its contents were encrypted.
According to authorities, a chatbot account linked to Alfozan’s spouse – which shared key identifiers with Alfozan’s own account – submitted prompts between September 24 and 30 regarding the assembly and deployment of surveillance equipment. The requests sought information on creating continuous audio recorders, customizing Wi-Fi connectivity, improving live listening capabilities, encrypting SD cards, and hiding remote access devices. The prompts also included specific technical details, such as the device’s custom header and unique MAC address.
In a statement, OpenAI said it discovered the “sophisticated” recording device and “used our models to understand the device and where it came from, identifying that a specific employee had crashed it a few days earlier.”
“We brought the matter to the FBI and are grateful to the agents and prosecutors who acted quickly to make an arrest,” the company said, adding that it would continue to support the ongoing investigation. “We take the protection of our technology, our data and our people seriously, and it is a matter of national importance. Our security program is designed to protect us against a wide range of threat actors…and this case is an example of how AI can help address these sophisticated security threats.”
OpenAI noted that there was no evidence that Alfozan accessed or exfiltrated model weights, source code, or customer data.
Alfozan has since been fired.
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