OpenAI Engineer Arrested Over Hidden Recording Device

The US Department of Justice said in a press release that federal authorities arrested OpenAI engineer Abdulrahman Alfozan on October 9 over an alleged attempt to intercept private conversations. Alfozan, a 35 year old Saudi national, appeared in federal court on October 13.

OpenAI personnel found an audio recording device, whose contents were encrypted, on September 30, plugged into a USB port of a television in an executive conference room at its San Francisco office and concealed in toilet paper. The criminal complaint alleges that surveillance footage showed Alfozan near the room despite lacking authorization to enter it. Security personnel later found a similar recorder in a bag containing his wallet and identification.

The complaint also alleges that a chatbot account associated with Alfozan’s spouse submitted prompts about building, concealing, encrypting and remotely accessing an audio recorder. If convicted, Alfozan faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, followed by three years of supervised release.

OpenAI said in an X post that it used its internal AI models to identify the individual responsible and trace the device, Reuters reports via NBC News. "At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data. The employee was terminated," the company said. The San Francisco Standard reports that OpenAI said it gradually restricted his access before his firing on the day of his arrest.