FBI arrests Saudi employee suspected of installing a recording device in an OpenAI meeting room

The U.S. Department of Justice said that Saudi OpenAI employee Abdulrahman Alfozan was arrested on October 9 over a hidden recording device found in an OpenAI executive meeting room, and the company has fired him. The Department of Justice said that Alfozan, 35, had no authorization to enter that meeting room, footage showed he appeared near the meeting room multiple times before the device was found, and he entered the room on October 5; around the same day, a wallet, identification and another similar recording device were found in his bag in the building. The Department of Justice also said that an account associated with Alfozan's spouse and sharing multiple identifiers with his own chatbot account was used to query information related to continuous recording and Wi-Fi, with prompts involving setting up, customizing, installing, testing, obfuscating and remotely accessing a recording device, and that the device was hidden in toilet paper and its contents were encrypted. FBI Director Kash Patel said he is suspected of placing the device to secretly obtain sensitive communications about the company's superintelligence technology. OpenAI said there is currently no indication that this person accessed or exfiltrated model weights, source code or customer data.