Employee arrested after listening device found in OpenAI conference room, FBI and the company say

WASHINGTON (AP) — An engineer at OpenAI has been charged with secretly installing a recording device inside a conference room in what officials said Tuesday was an effort to capture sensitive conversations about the company’s technology.

The employee, identified as a 35-year-old Saudi national named Abdulrahman Alfozan, was arrested Friday, a week after the ChatGPT maker discovered an audio recording device hidden in the conference room, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court in San Francisco.

The complaint did not identify the company, but the company confirmed in a separate statement that it had discovered a “sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of our offices,” reported the finding to the FBI and fired the employee.

“We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier. We referred the matter to the FBI, and we’re grateful to the agents and prosecutors who moved quickly to make an arrest. The FBI’s investigation is ongoing and we will continue to support their work,” an OpenAI spokesperson said.

“At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data. The employee was terminated,” the statement said.

The complaint does not detail what Alfozan might have wanted to do with any captured communications.

Alfozan made his first court appearance Tuesday on a charge of using or endeavoring to use an electronic, mechanical, or other device to intercept oral communications. It was not immediately clear if he had a lawyer who could speak on his behalf.

The recording device was found September 30 concealed in toilet paper and inserted into a USB port on the back of a television in the conference room, according to the complaint.

Though the conference room where the recording device was found did not have a camera at the time it was installed, closed-circuit television footage inside the company’s offices revealed that Alfozan was near the conference room on a half-dozen occasions last month despite not having any authority to access the space, the complaint says.

The company subsequently added a camera to the room that last week captured Alfozan entering and checking behind the television where the recording device was installed, according to the FBI.

The complaint also he also used a productivity tool to make multiple inquiries about the company’s building addresses, meeting rooms, meeting-room capacities and calendars.

Before his arrest last week, the complaint says, Alfozan left an unattended bag in a different room in the building that included his wallet, identification and another recording device.