A SAUDI EMPLOYEE of OpenAI was arrested after allegedly planting a recording device in one of the company\u2019s San Francisco offices, the AI firm and federal prosecutors said Tuesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of our offices\u201d and \u201creferred the matter to the FBI,\u201d OpenAI told AFP in a statement.<\/p>\n
OpenAI\u2019s security team found the device late last month and the employee, Saudi national Abdulrahman Alfozan, was arrested on 9 October, the US Justice Department said.<\/p>\n
Alfozan, a 35-year-old engineer who had worked for OpenAI since July 2025, allegedly wrapped a USB device in toilet paper and inserted it into a television located in an \u201cexecutive conference room,\u201d according to a Justice Department statement.<\/p>\n
He was allegedly caught on camera \u201cnear\u201d the conference room multiple times but was not authorised to participate in meetings located there.<\/p>\n
He used a \u201cproductivity tool\u201d to search for more information about OpenAI\u2019s office buildings, meeting rooms, calendars, schedules and people\u2019s locations, according to the statement.<\/p>\n
A chatbot account connected to Alfozan\u2019s spouse also allegedly contained queries related to remote audio recording and encrypting memory cards.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis serious situation underscores why winning the global super intelligence race is a national security prerogative,\u201d Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton said in the statement.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe intelligence community remains committed to safeguarding America\u2019s cutting-edge intellectual property from foreign threats,\u201d Clayton added.<\/p>\n
The arrest and allegations come amid a fierce global race to dominate in artificial intelligence, which the Trump administration has pushed to be rebranded as \u201csuperintelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Saudi Arabia\u2019s state-backed AI firm Humain invested $3 billion (\u20ac2.68 billion) in Elon Musk\u2019s xAI shortly before the American billionaire\u2019s space company, SpaceX, acquired the AI division in February.<\/p>\n
Now known as SpaceXAI, the division announced last year that it was teaming up with Humain to build a 500-megawatt data centre in Saudi Arabia.\n<\/p>\n
Multiple devices<\/p>\n
It was not immediately clear what, if any, information the recording device was able to collect.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data,\u201d OpenAI told AFP in a statement.<\/p>\n
A second device was found by OpenAI\u2019s security team when they searched an unattended bag that belonged to Alfozan, according to the Justice Department.<\/p>\n
Alfozan was caught on security footage from inside the restricted conference room where he appeared to look behind the television where the recording device had been placed, the Department said.<\/p>\n
A LinkedIn account matching Alfozan\u2019s name and resume shows that he previously worked at Facebook-owner Meta, as well as an AI startup and a venture capital firm.<\/p>\n
He was also a student at University of California at Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.<\/p>\n
The Justice Department said Alfozan had been charged with \u201cusing or endeavouring to use an electronic, mechanical, or other device to intercept oral communications,\u201d for which he could face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 (\u20ac223,000) fine.<\/p>\n
It did not accuse Alfozan nor Saudi Arabia, which is a close US ally, of spying activity in its statement on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Alfozan is expected to appear at a federal court hearing on 19 October.<\/p>\n
In 2022, a former Twitter worker, Ahmad Abouammo, was found guilty of spying for Saudi officials keen to unmask critics on the platform.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A SAUDI EMPLOYEE of OpenAI was arrested after allegedly planting a recording device in one of the company\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":656146,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[277926,220,218,219,285,61,60,1682,10679,383,80,277927],"class_list":["post-656145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-abdulrahman-alfozan","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-fbi","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-openai","tag-san-francisco","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-technology","tag-us-justice-department"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=656145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656145\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/656146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=656145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=656145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=656145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}