OpenAI engineer arrested over a hidden recorder
The Justice Department accuses him of intercepting oral communications in an executive meeting room; OpenAI says there is no sign code or customer data was accessed.
Abdulrahman Alfozan, an OpenAI engineer, was arrested on Oct. 9 in the United States over the alleged installation of a hidden recorder in an executive meeting room at the company in San Francisco. The Department of Justice announced the case on Oct. 13, the day of his initial court appearance. These are allegations: the defendant has not been found guilty, and his defense had not commented in the sources consulted.
Alfozan is 35, a Saudi national, and had worked at OpenAI since July 2025. He is charged with using a device to intercept oral communications. If convicted, the maximum penalty is five years in prison, a fine of up to 250 000 dollars and three years of supervised release.
What the complaint says
According to the Justice Department, OpenAI staff found a device plugged into a USB port behind a television in the room on Sept. 30. It was wrapped in toilet paper, was installed around Sept. 28 and its contents were encrypted. On Oct. 5, a similar device was found in another company building, inside a bag holding the defendant's wallet and ID card, which the complaint says was left unattended.
Prosecutors also say that an account on a chatbot tied to the defendant made queries between Sept. 24 and 30 about how to build, place and hide a recorder; several include the first device's MAC address. They also allege that, before Sept. 28, he used a productivity tool to look up building addresses, meeting rooms, calendars and executives' locations.
The room, the complaint says, is where confidential research, product plans and dealings with governments are discussed. The case is led by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California and the Justice Department's National Security Division, with the FBI investigating.
What OpenAI says
The company fired the employee and referred the case to the FBI, according to BleepingComputer. That outlet adds that the company used its own AI models to analyze the device and identify the employee, and that it has "no indications" that model weights, source code or customer data were accessed. That account does not appear in the official statement and has not been independently verified.
The Justice Department's statement ties the case to a presidential national security memorandum on U.S. advantage in superintelligence technology. It is still unknown what the encrypted recording contained or whether it was decrypted, and the official text does not specify which court or which section of federal law the charge was filed under.
