OpenAI Engineer Arrested in the US on Charges of Secretly Recording Meetings

In the United States, 35-year-old Saudi citizen Abdulrahman Alfozan, who had worked as an engineer at OpenAI since July 2025, has been arrested. He is accused of using or attempting to use an electronic or mechanical device to intercept oral communications. He was detained on October 9 and first appeared in federal court on October 13.

According to the US Department of Justice, around September 30 employees found a hidden recording device in one of OpenAI's offices in San Francisco: it had been plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive meeting room. The device was hidden in toilet paper, it had been installed around September 28, and its contents turned out to be encrypted.

According to the prosecution, this meeting room was often used to discuss confidential technical, commercial and strategic information: the company's own research, product plans and business development opportunities, as well as non-public information about OpenAI's technical progress, its priorities, its interactions with government bodies and its commercial ties.

Surveillance camera footage showed that Alfozan appeared near this meeting room on various days before the device was discovered, although he did not have access rights to it and did not take part in its meetings. According to the complaint, before September 28 he repeatedly used a work tool to search for the addresses of OpenAI buildings, meeting rooms, their capacity and schedules, the location of executives' offices and meetings with external partners.

In addition, a chatbot account linked to Alfozan's wife and matching his own on a number of identifiers sent requests between September 24 and 30 about assembling, configuring, installing, testing, disguising and remotely accessing a recording device. On September 27 and 28, requests came through the same account specifically about the device that was found, including its non-standard header and unique MAC address.

On October 5, according to the prosecution, Alfozan entered the meeting room and, judging by the footage, looked behind the television where the device had been plugged in. The same day, in another room of the office, he left a bag unattended; security staff opened it and found, among other items, a second recording device similar to the first.

If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000, followed by three years of supervised release. The FBI is handling the case.

Image: United States Department of Justice Public domain · License

Translation editors: Соловьев В., Пеков А.