OpenAI employee accused of placing recording devices in the office

The U.S. Department of Justice said an OpenAI engineer was arrested on suspicion of secretly placing a recording device in a company conference room and was charged with using an electronic device to intercept oral communications. Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi national, was arrested last Friday and made his initial court appearance on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The DOJ said an employee found the device on September 30 in a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room, where it was hidden in toilet paper and had been installed about two days before discovery. The room is often used for confidential matters such as research, product planning, and business development. The indictment alleges that Alfozan used productivity tools to look up the office building address, conference room capacity and calendars, and meeting locations for executives and external partners. A chatbot account linked to his spouse submitted prompts from September 24 to 30 for building, installing, testing, obfuscating, and remotely accessing a continuous recording device. The company also found another similar recording device in a bag he had left unattended. OpenAI said it contacted the FBI and fired the employee, and there is currently no indication that he improperly accessed or leaked model weights, source code, or customer data.