Build a continuous audio recorder. Develop a speech-triggered recording. Add Wi-Fi connectivity. Encrypt the memory card.
Those are some of the incentives an engineer arrested by federal authorities last week is accused of subjugating himself to an artificial intelligence chatbot to program a recording device hidden in an OpenAI conference room.
In a criminal complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and made public Tuesday, federal prosecutors allege that the engineer then hid the recording device in a management conference room at one of the company’s offices in San Francisco, used for executive meetings and briefings with government officials.
The filing describes how OpenAI’s security team on September 30 found the thumb-sized recording device folded into a length of toilet paper and plugged into the back of a television in the conference room. The company said it then used AI to identify the suspected culprit.
Details are emerging about the accomplished engineer at the center of the accusations, Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi national who studied at MIT and long worked in Silicon Valley, and who has expressed hope of one day returning to work in his country’s tech industry. The Justice Department arrested him on October 9 and charged him with illegally using an electronic device to intercept oral communications.
Notes of foreign subterfuge in the case, denied by Alfozan’s lawyer, have attracted the attention of Silicon Valley companies and have been seen as a major security concern by the Trump administration as it pushes for technological dominance in the AI boom. The administration, meanwhile, has rejected calls to regulate AI despite warnings of doom from tech executives themselves, saying it would hamper economic growth and competition.
“This serious situation demonstrates why winning the global super intelligence race is a national security prerogative,” Jay Clayton, director of national intelligence, said in a press release this week. He said his agency is “committed to protecting America’s cutting-edge intellectual property from foreign threats.”
OpenAI said in an article on X this week that it discovered a “sophisticated recording device” hidden in its office and used its own product to determine where it came from and identify the employee who placed it there. OpenAI did not name Alfozan in its post, but said it had fired the employee involved and referred the matter to the FBI.
“At this time, we have no indication that this individual inappropriately accessed or exfiltrated model weights, source code, or customer data,” the company said in the post. “Our security program is designed to protect against a wide range of threat actors, from insider risks to cybercriminals to nation states, and this case is an example of how AI can help address these sophisticated security threats. »
OpenAI did not respond to The Times’ requests for additional information.
Alfozan studied computer science and engineering at MIT. While a student there, he interned at Massachusetts-based cloud computing company Akamai Technologies, German software company SAP and Microsoft, according to his LinkedIn.
He earned a master’s degree in data science from UC Berkeley and worked for five years as an engineer at Meta, according to his online profile. He was a founding engineer at logistics and delivery startup Nash, a San Francisco company incubated by the prestigious startup accelerator Y Combinator. He is listed as a venture partner at RAED Ventures, a venture capital firm in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. He joined the firm around the same time Prince Khalid bin Bader Al Saud became a partner there, according to announcements on the firm’s website.
He acquired permanent resident status in the United States in 2020, according to court documents, and was hired by OpenAI in July last year.
In a recent episode of “Identity Capital,” a podcast about professional careers recorded in Arabic, Alfozan described his upbringing in the coastal city of Dammam and his acceptance into Saudi Arabia’s national educational program for gifted children in the fields of science, technology and mathematics.
He described, according to a translation of the podcast episode, his desire to stay in the United States to gain expertise before ultimately returning to Saudi Arabia, advice he said he received from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman during his visit to the Bay Area in 2016. He spoke of forming a group with other Saudi professionals in the Bay Area to advise businesses in his country.
Federal prosecutors said in the complaint that the recovered device linked to Alfozan was a small microcontroller with a detachable camera sensor and digital microphone, a model readily available for purchase and listed for $24 on Amazon.
An investigation by OpenAI did not recover any files from the device’s microSD card, according to the complaint.
The complaint says Alfozan queried a productivity tool to ask about meeting rooms where company executives meet and where the company’s external partners would meet. Requests were also submitted to an anonymous AI chatbot account associated with Alfozan’s wife, asking for information on how to capture audio, use passive scanning when listening live, and encrypt an SD card, among other prompts, the complaint states.
The complaint states that the prompts indicate that Alfozan was “interested in constructing, customizing, installing, audio recording, testing, obfuscating, and remotely accessing, among other things, a clandestine audio listening and recording device.”
There is no camera footage showing Alfozan installing the device in the conference room where he was discovered, because there were no cameras in the conference room in late September, the filing states. But other company surveillance footage captured him near the conference room at that time, according to the complaint. Federal prosecutors said Alfozan had no authority to access the conference room, which could only be reserved by executives and their assistants.
In early October, according to the complaint, a camera was installed in the conference room and filmed Alfozan checking behind the television. Alfozan, his wife and another family member had booked a one-way ticket to Saudi Arabia, according to the complaint.
Alfozan’s attorney, William Pernik, declined to comment, saying in an email that he and his client were focused on preparing for a hearing scheduled for Monday.
Pernik said in statements to other media outlets that his client “poses no flight risk,” has “long-standing ties to the community” and would challenge the narrative emerging about Alfozan, noting that Alfozan was charged with violating a federal registration law and not acting as a foreign agent. Pernik said the allegations were “totally irrelevant” and that his client’s flight to Saudi Arabia had been booked in advance, and urged people not to make assumptions about Alfozan because of his Saudi nationality.
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