Saudi OpenAI Engineer Arrested for Planting Secret Recording Device in Meeting Room

Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi engineer who worked at OpenAI, was arrested by the FBI and charged with attempting to intercept oral communications after allegedly planting a secret recording device wrapped in toilet paper behind a TV in a confidential meeting room. The official complaint states Alfozan used AI chatbots to inquire about meeting room availability and later asked a chatbot associated with his spouse how to build and remotely access a recording device. OpenAI stated it used its own AI models to analyze the device and confirmed it has no indications of him inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data.