FBI Arrests OpenAI Engineer Over a Toilet-Paper-Wrapped Listening Device
The Justice Department said Tuesday that Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi national who joined OpenAI as an engineer in July 2025, was arrested on October 9 and charged with using or attempting to use an electronic, mechanical or other device to intercept oral communications. Prosecutors say OpenAI staff found a hidden audio recorder on or about September 30, plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room at one of the company's San Francisco offices and wrapped in toilet paper. The company determined the device had been installed around September 28. Alfozan made his first appearance in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday.
The complaint alleges that in the days before the installation, Alfozan used an internal "productivity tool" to ask about meeting-room locations, building addresses, room capacities, calendars, and the offices of executives and outside partners. Separately, an account associated with his spouse, which shared identifiers with his own, submitted prompts between September 24 and 30 about building, installing, obscuring and remotely accessing a recorder — including "build a continuous audio recorder" and "encrypt the SD card." On September 27 and 28, the account asked about the specific device later found, down to its MAC address.
On October 5, surveillance video shows Alfozan entering the restricted conference room and appearing to look behind the television where the device was hidden. That same day he left a bag unattended in another OpenAI room; security staff opened it and found his wallet, identification and a second, similar recording device. OpenAI has said it gradually restricted his system and physical access between September 30 and his arrest, then suspended him and seized his company equipment, timing his firing with the FBI so as not to disrupt the investigation.
"We discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of our offices," OpenAI said in a statement, adding that it "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 company referred the matter to the FBI and said it has "no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data." The employee was terminated.
FBI Director Kash Patel said Alfozan "allegedly concealed a covert recording device inside his employer's executive conference room to secretly capture sensitive communications about the company's super intelligence technology," and that protecting American super-intelligence innovation is essential and one of the bureau's "highest counterintelligence priorities." U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian was blunter: "For us it is a matter of national security." Prosecutors did not accuse Alfozan or Saudi Arabia of espionage or tie him to any foreign government.
If convicted, Alfozan faces a maximum of five years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release. He remains in custody pending a detention hearing on October 19 before U.S. Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse, and it was not immediately clear whether he has an attorney. For OpenAI and its peers, the case puts insider risk — physical security, access to executive meetings and monitoring of employee accounts — squarely on the agenda.