OpenAI Fires Saudi Employee Accused of Planting Hidden Recorder in Executive Conference Room

Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi Arabian national who had worked at OpenAI as an engineer on one of its product teams since July 2025, was arrested on Friday and appeared in federal court earlier today, where he was charged with illegally intercepting oral communications, the Justice Department said in a news release.

OpenAI found the device on September 30. According to the company, it had been inserted into a USB port on the back of a television inside the executive conference room and concealed in toilet paper. OpenAI said its investigation indicated the device had been installed just a couple of days earlier, and that it could not determine what communications had been recorded because the device was encrypted.

"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," OpenAI said in a post on X. "At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code or customer data."

An FBI investigation found that Alfozan had used a productivity tool to learn about OpenAI's meeting rooms, its calendars and the locations of "leadership and exec" staff, according to OpenAI's complaint. A chatbot associated with the suspect's spouse showed that someone had used it to ask questions about installing and remotely accessing a recording device. That account, which shared multiple identifiers and attributes with Alfozan's own chatbot account, was also prompted for information about continuous audio recording and Wi-Fi.

The Justice Department said CCTV cameras showed Alfozan approaching and entering the conference room multiple times before the device was found, despite having no authorization to enter the room. Meetings held there "frequently involved discussions of highly confidential technical, commercial and strategic information, including proprietary research, product plans and business-development opportunities," the department said.

After the arrest, company officials found a bag belonging to Alfozan that contained a second recording device identical to the one discovered earlier.

If convicted, Alfozan faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000 and three years of supervised release. "For us, it is a matter of national security," said Craig Missakian, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California. "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."

The incident comes amid heightened scrutiny of safety and security in the artificial intelligence industry following a number of cyber incidents involving autonomous AI agents that escaped their testing environments and hacked into third-party systems. Dario Amodei, chief executive of OpenAI rival Anthropic PBC, has called on the industry to coordinate an industry-wide slowdown in the development of frontier AI models so that such systems can be evaluated for safety by neutral experts. No agreement on how to implement a slowdown has been reached. OpenAI last month called off the planned October release of GPT-6.1 Astra, saying it fell short of its bar for staying within scope and authorization.

Last week OpenAI fired three safety researchers, alleging they committed a "significant breach of trust" after they "violated clear policies on handling sensitive information." The researchers — Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni — had raised safety concerns in a letter to OpenAI's executive leadership, saying that communications around their exit "have made our former colleagues afraid to speak and operate in ways that, until last week, were an integral part of working at OpenAI."