OpenAI engineer faces 5 years and $250K fine as FBI lobs foreign spy charges.
It took OpenAI two days to notice that a recording device was hidden in a restricted executive conference room where leadership met to discuss highly confidential information, including technical progress, government engagements, and commercial partnerships.
Only those with special clearance are supposed to access that room. But the FBI believes the recording device was planted by Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old engineer from Saudi Arabia, who became a permanent US legal resident in 2020. In a press release Tuesday announcing his arrest, the FBI alleged that chatbot logs and CCTV footage suggested that Alfozan—who worked as an OpenAI engineer for more than a year—sought to use the device to spy on OpenAI and risked leaking trade secrets in a way that threatened national security.
To conceal the USB device, Alfozan allegedly wrapped it in toilet paper, then plugged it into the back of a conference room television. The device was likely planted on September 28, and OpenAI found it on September 30 and quickly determined that its contents were encrypted, the FBI said. Days later, on October 5, OpenAI installed a camera in that conference room, and the CCTV footage allegedly showed Alfozan attempting to retrieve the recording device that same day.
If convicted of violating laws against unlawful recordings, Alfozan faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, the FBI said.
OpenAI did not immediately move to eject Alfozan as a suspected spy. Instead, it gradually cut off his access to systems while working with the FBI to analyze the recording device’s contents. Once enough evidence was gathered, OpenAI timed Alfozan’s firing on Friday with the FBI’s arrest.
Citing a Trump memo ordering coordinated efforts to maintain America’s AI advantage, FBI Director Kash Patel celebrated Alfozan’s arrest and vowed to continue policing efforts to spy on frontier labs like OpenAI.
It’s “essential to safeguarding our nation’s economic strength and national security, and the FBI views that mission as one of our highest counterintelligence priorities,” Patel said.
Catching an accused AI spy
OpenAI hired Alfozan in July 2025, but the record suggests that he started acting suspiciously in the past few months.
In August, Alfozan allegedly used an OpenAI productivity agent to figure out where and when sensitive meetings were held, a recently unsealed affidavit submitted by FBI special agent Lydia Liang said.
Liang is a data analyst who joined the FBI after working for various tech companies. She analyzed the recording device that OpenAI found, which she said was a Chinese-made Seeed XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense.
According to Liang, the Seeed device “had been customized to obfuscate anything stored on the device, such as potentially intercepted audio communications.” And the microSD card had “a layout consistent with a potentially encrypted file system.”
In addition to reviewing Alfozan’s queries to OpenAI’s productivity agent, the FBI also reviewed an AI chatbot account associated with his spouse. Those logs showed user prompts referencing the Seeed device’s unique MAC address, the FBI said, while researching how to continuously record on that device, set up speech-triggered recording, and encrypt an SD card, among other queries.
“These written prompts attributable to Alfozan and/or his spouse, indicate that Alfozan inserted Recording Device 1 into the television in Conference Room 1 and was interested in building, customizing, installing, audio recording, testing, obfuscating, and remote accessing, among other things, a surreptitious audio listening and recording device,” Liang said.
Second recording device found
CCTV footage allegedly caught Alfozan lurking outside the executive conference room on 10 different days in September alone, Liang noted.
Even more troubling to the FBI and OpenAI, it seemed that Alfozan had either deemed his plot successful and planned to plant another device or had noticed the camera stopped working and attempted to swap it out.
On the day he was seen checking behind the conference room TV, Alfozan also reported to OpenAI’s lost and found that he lost a bag. That bag had been left unattended in a printer room, the FBI said, where security personnel found it and discovered another Seeed device inside.
Alfozan seemingly did not suspect he had been caught, as he returned to the lost and found the next day and complained about missing items from the bag. When listing what had been taken, though, he did not mention the second recording device.
It remains unclear who the secret recordings were intended for, but that information may soon come out, as officials seem inclined to make an example of Alfozan at a time when maintaining AI dominance is a top Trump administration priority.
US Attorney for the Northern District of California Craig Missakian said he would keep an eye on emerging threats in Silicon Valley.
“The Bay Area and Silicon Valley lead the world in developing tomorrow’s technology, and our Office will continue to stand at the forefront of protecting that American innovation,” Missakian said. “For us, it is a matter of national security. This arrest highlights our relentless efforts in partnership with the FBI to identify and prosecute those who seek to steal our technology, as alleged in the complaint.”