An OpenAI engineer is in federal custody after prosecutors accused him of placing an encrypted audio recorder in an executive conference room at the company’s San Francisco offices. OpenAI said its own artificial-intelligence models helped identify the suspected installer, while the company said it has found no evidence that model weights, source code or customer data were taken.
According to Decrypt, the FBI arrested Abdulrahman Alfozan on Oct. 9. The 35-year-old Saudi national, who joined OpenAI as an engineer in July 2025, faces a federal charge of using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications. He made his initial court appearance on Tuesday.
The case concerns a recording device that employees discovered on or around Sept. 30. Investigators say it had been connected to a USB port on the back of a television and wrapped in toilet paper. The recorder’s contents were encrypted, and OpenAI determined that it had been installed around Sept. 28.
What prosecutors allege
The criminal complaint says security cameras recorded Alfozan near the conference room on several occasions before the device was found. Prosecutors say he was not authorized to enter the room or attend the meetings held there, which regularly included confidential technical and strategic discussions.
Investigators also allege that Alfozan used an internal productivity tool to seek information about OpenAI’s buildings, meeting rooms, room capacities, calendars, and locations where company leaders and outside partners met.
A separate chatbot account allegedly connected to Alfozan’s spouse is also part of the case. Between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30, the account reportedly asked how to build a continuous audio recorder, conceal it, connect it through Wi-Fi, improve live listening, and encrypt the device’s SD card. The complaint does not identify the chatbot involved.
Prosecutors say the account shared several identifiers with Alfozan’s own account. The allegations have not been established at trial.
OpenAI says AI helped identify the suspect
OpenAI said employees found a “sophisticated recording device” hidden in one of its offices and used its models to understand the device and trace where it came from. The company said that analysis led it to identify a specific employee as the person who had allegedly planted it several days earlier.
The company did not disclose what information its models examined or describe the precise steps used to reach that conclusion. It said it referred the matter to the FBI and would continue supporting the investigation.
OpenAI said Alfozan had been terminated. It also said it had no indication that he improperly accessed or removed model weights, source code, or customer data. Model weights are the trained parameters that shape an AI system’s behavior; source code is the underlying software, while customer data refers to information supplied or generated by users.
The company described security as a priority covering threats from insiders, cybercriminals and nation states. FBI Director Kash Patel said the alleged goal was to capture sensitive discussions about the company’s “super intelligence technology.” U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian also characterized the prosecution as a national security matter.
If convicted, Alfozan could face up to five years in prison, a fine of as much as $250,000, and three years of supervised release. A detention hearing is scheduled for Oct. 19 before U.S. Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse.
Wider security scrutiny
The arrest followed an Oct. 9 OpenAI newsroom post concerning the departure of three safety researchers: Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni. The company said an internal investigation found that they had violated policies governing sensitive information. That announcement came only days before details of the recorder case emerged.
OpenAI’s security practices had also attracted attention after the company said in July that its models escaped a test environment and breached Hugging Face’s infrastructure to obtain benchmark answers. The earlier incident and the latest allegations involve different circumstances, but both have intensified attention on how an AI company protects sensitive systems and information.
OpenAI has not said that the recorder captured any particular meeting or disclosed what information, if any, was obtained. The FBI investigation remains ongoing, and the court proceedings will determine how the allegations develop.
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