An OpenAI engineer was arrested on suspicion of hiding an audio recording device in an executive conference room at the company’s San Francisco headquarters, federal prosecutors said Tuesday. Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi citizen, was arrested Friday and charged with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications. He made his initial appearance in federal court on Tuesday and remains in custody. An unattended bag found in the company’s offices contained Alfozan’s wallet and identification, as well as a recording device, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in San Francisco. Alfozan has worked as an engineer at OpenAI since July 2025, prosecutors said. OpenAI staff found the device on September 30. It was plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room and had been hidden in toilet paper, the complaint says. The company determined that it was installed around September 28 and that its contents were encrypted. Surveillance footage shows Alfozan near the room on several dates before the discovery, although he was not authorized to enter the room or attend meetings there, prosecutors said. The room meetings frequently involved confidential technical, business and strategic information, including proprietary research, product plans and government commitments, according to the complaint. Prosecutors say this image shows Alfozan looking behind a television in an OpenAI conference room. Source: Courtesy of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California Before installing the device, Alfozan used a productivity tool to inquire about the addresses of OpenAI’s buildings, meeting rooms, room capacity and calendars, as well as meeting locations of leaders and external partners, the complaint alleges. A chatbot account linked to Alfozan’s spouse, who shared identifiers with his own account, sent requests between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 about construction, installation, blackout, and remotely accessing a recording device, prosecutors said. The queries included how to “build a continuous audio recorder” and “encrypt the SD card,” prosecutors claimed. On September 27 and 28, the account asked about the specific device that was later found, including its unique MAC address. On Oct. 5, the complaint says, Alfozan entered the conference room and appeared to look behind the television. That same day, she allegedly left a bag unattended in another room. Security personnel who opened it found his wallet and identification, along with a second recording device similar to the first. “For us it is a matter of national security,” US Attorney Craig Missakian said in a statement. A recording device with encrypted contents was allegedly discovered in an OpenAI office in San Francisco. | Source: Courtesy of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California. FBI Director Kash Patel said protecting America’s AI innovation is among the bureau’s top counterintelligence priorities. Scott Schelble, special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Francisco field office, said the agency is committed to protecting sensitive research and proprietary technology. If convicted, Alfozan faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, followed by three years of supervised release. The case is being prosecuted by the Homeland Security, Cyber and Special Prosecutions Section of the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California. OpenAI said in X (opens in a new tab) that after discovering the device, employees used the company’s artificial intelligence models to determine what it was and where it came from, and referred the matter to the FBI. The company thanked agents and prosecutors who “moved quickly to make an arrest.” According to OpenAI, its technical surveillance countermeasures team found the device during a sweep of a conference room. OpenAI described the device as sophisticated and designed to evade detection, saying it had advanced encryption, audio monitoring capabilities and a mechanism to transfer data in a way intended to avoid monitoring. The company said researchers used its models to analyze forensic images of the device storage and evaluate changes to the underlying data. The company said it has evidence that Alfozan intended to place other recording devices in sensitive spaces to secretly record meetings. According to OpenAI, Alfozan was a member of the product team. The company said it coordinated the timing of his firing with the FBI to avoid disrupting the investigation, and he was fired on Friday, the day he was arrested. Between Sept. 30 and then, OpenAI said, it gradually restricted his access to systems and spaces, then suspended his physical and network access, placed him on leave, and secured company-provided equipment. A YouTube video last month touted him as the only Saudi employee at OpenAI. “Honestly, this year felt like five years anywhere else,” he said in response to a question about his experience. “The idea of AI is that it handles things that you might not want to do, so that you can focus on tasks or enjoy more of the hobbies or work that you enjoy and let you do the tedious tasks,” Alfozan said later in the video. A LinkedIn profile matching Alfozan’s name lists his role at OpenAI as an engineering lead on the company’s AI agent platform. Before joining OpenAI, he was a founding engineer at Nash, an AI infrastructure company for logistics, from 2022 to August 2025, according to his LinkedIn profile. From 2017 to 2022 he was a senior systems engineer at Meta. His previous experience, according to the profile, includes a stint as a systems engineer at Reach Labs, a wireless power startup in Y Combinator’s Summer 2015 batch, and internships at Microsoft, SAP in Berlin, and Akamai Technologies. He has a master’s degree in data science from UC Berkeley, the LinkedIn profile says. A man in the passenger seat of a car at Alfozan’s home in Millbrae said the family did not want to talk to reporters. OpenAI said there is no indication that Alfozan has improperly accessed or taken model weights, source code or customer data and has seen no activity that compromises the security of its products or customer information. The company said it will continue to support the FBI investigation. OpenAI said it treats the protection of its technology, data and people “as a matter of national importance” and called the case an example of how AI can counter sophisticated security threats. A detention hearing before Federal Judge Alex G. Tse is scheduled for October 19.
