OpenAI Engineer Arrested for Bugging Office, Company Says AI Caught Him

In brief

• The FBI arrested OpenAI engineer Abdulrahman Alfozan on Oct. 9 for allegedly planting a hidden audio recorder in an executive conference room at the OpenAI’s San Francisco offices.
• Prosecutors say a chatbot account tied to his spouse asked how to build, hide, and remotely access a continuous audio recorder days before the device was installed.
• OpenAI says its models helped identify him and that it has no indication he took model weights, source code, or customer data.

An OpenAI engineer is in federal custody after allegedly hiding an encrypted audio recorder behind a television in one of the company's executive conference rooms in San Francisco. OpenAI says its own AI models helped figure out who put it there.

“We discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of our offices,” OpenAI said in a statement on X. “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.”

The Justice Department identified the suspect as Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi national who has worked as an engineer at OpenAI since July 2025. He was arrested on Oct. 9, charged with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications, and made his initial appearance in federal court on Tuesday.