It is not the first case of espionage that he has suffered OpenAIbut it is the first known in which AI plays a role in its resolution. The company of Sam Altman has used its own artificial intelligence models to investigate a hidden recorder discovered in its San Francisco offices and the investigations have led to the arrest of Abdulrahman Alfozan. This 35-year-old Saudi engineer had worked at the company since July 2025 and is now accused of installing the device to intercept conversations.
The security team found the device on September 30 during an inspection of a meeting room reserved for managers. Was connected to a USB port behind a TVwith its encrypted content, and, curiously, camouflaged with toilet paper. Researchers place its installation around September 28.
The company maintains that its artificial intelligence helped understand the operation of the device and trace its origin until the employee was identified. As he explained to The San Francisco Standard, he used his models to analyze copies of the device’s storage and study changes in the data, although he has not identified which models he used or detailed all the steps that allowed him to link it to Alfozan.
Security cameras too They showed the engineer near the room on several occasionsdespite lacking authorization to access. On October 5, they recorded him entering and looking behind the television and that same day they found another similar recorder in an unattended bag that contained the detainee’s wallet and documentation.
Among the evidence found were inquiries about continuous recording, remote listening and encryption made from a chatbot account linked to his wife that investigators also linked to the engineer. Some included the MAC address of the device found, its network identifier, but the documentation does not confirm that she wrote them or that the service used was ChatGPT.
Alfozan had also used an internal tool to check meeting calendars and locations of managers before the device appeared. OpenAI maintains that it found signs that planned to install more recorders in other sensitive areas of its offices.
The company fired the engineer on October 9 and he was arrested by the FBI that same day. Alfozan appeared in federal court on the 13th and remains in custody awaiting a hearing on the 19th, with a possible sentence of up to five years in prison if convicted.
The room hosted confidential conversations about research, future products, strategic decisions and relationships with governments and business partnersinformation that can be worth a lot of money. The US authorities consider it a matter of national securityalthough they have not indicated that Alfozan acted for the Saudi Government or for a foreign intelligence service.
OpenAI assures that it has not found signs of improper access or extraction of the source code, the parameters of its models or customer data. The FBI investigation continues and It has not been clarified what information the recorder captured.