Federal prosecutors have charged a Saudi national employed as an engineer at OpenAI with planting a hidden audio recording device in an executive conference room at the company’s San Francisco offices — and say he may have been planning to plant more.
The case, announced Tuesday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California — the federal prosecutors covering San Francisco — identifies the man as Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35. He had worked as an engineer at OpenAI since July 2025; his LinkedIn listed him as an engineering lead on AI agent software.
OpenAI staff discovered the device on September 30, plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room. It was thumb-sized, wrapped in toilet paper to hide it, and its stored data was encrypted. Prosecutors believe it was installed around September 28. The circuit board carried a microphone and a slot for a camera sensor.
That room was no ordinary meeting space. According to the criminal complaint, it regularly hosted discussions of highly confidential technical, commercial, and strategic information — proprietary research, product plans, government engagements, and commercial relationships. Alfozan had no authority to enter it.
Investigators say office security footage showed him near the conference room on multiple occasions before the device was found. Days later, in early October, security staff found a second, similar recording device in a bag he had left unattended in another part of the building. The FBI arrested him on October 9, and he made his first court appearance this Tuesday. A detention hearing is scheduled for October 19 before U.S. Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse.
OpenAI confirmed the incident in a statement posted on X, saying it had used its own AI models to figure out what the device was and trace who planted it. “We discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of our offices,” the company said. It added that it had evidence Alfozan intended to place additional recording devices in sensitive areas to secretly record meetings. He has been fired, and the company says it currently has no indication he accessed or took model weights, source code, or customer data.
He faces a single federal charge: using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications, the federal wiretapping offense that covers bugging a room even when the recording is never retrieved. If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison, a $250,000 fine, and three years of supervised release. The charge is an allegation; Alfozan is presumed innocent unless a court finds otherwise. Prosecutors from the Justice Department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section are working the case alongside the San Francisco federal prosecutors — a staffing choice that signals how seriously Washington is treating it, even though this is not an espionage charge.
Why this matters beyond Silicon Valley: the FBI is America’s federal police force, and this case shows what the global AI race now looks like from the inside. Frontier labs employ thousands of engineers from dozens of countries, and a single insider with a $15 circuit board can threaten secrets worth billions. Every major lab — in the US, Europe, China, and the Gulf — faces the same vulnerability. The irony is hard to miss: OpenAI, a company racing to build ever more capable AI, says it used its own models to catch the person bugging its boardroom. As Washington’s new ‘Super Intelligence’ AI task force takes shape and US labs share models with British safety testers, the industry’s most sensitive conversations are becoming a counterintelligence problem.
Alfozan remains in federal custody. Prosecutors have not said whether they believe anyone directed him — or whether any recording ever left the room.
