An OpenAI employee has been arrested and charged with using a hidden recording device in a San Francisco office, according to the artificial intelligence company and the US Justice Department.
Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi citizen, was arrested on October 9, more than a week after staff at OpenAI discovered an audio recording device in the back of a television in an executive conference room, the Justice Department said on Tuesday. Mr Alfozan, who is accused of planting the device, is currently in custody having appeared in court in San Francisco on Tuesday.
Mr Alfozan had started working at OpenAI in July last year and worked on its product team. He was fired on the same day as his arrest, the company said.
The incident is poised to heighten concerns about security at top technology companies at a moment when nations are competing aggressively to develop more powerful AI systems.
“At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data,” the company posted on social platform X on Tuesday.
OpenAI said one of its security teams discovered the device on September 30 during a sweep of a company conference room. According to details and images released by the Justice Department, the device was plugged into a USB port in the back of a TV in the room and covered with toilet paper to disguise it.
An image released by the Justice Department showed a small, black device with the text “Seeed Studio” on it. The agency said OpenAI determined it was planted around September 28.
OpenAI said it used its AI models to understand more about the device and identify who placed it.
Mr Alfozan did not have approval to access the conference room, which typically hosted meetings involving “highly confidential technical, commercial, and strategic information”, according to the complaint, which references an unnamed AI company with offices in San Francisco.
The company said it uncovered evidence that Mr Alfozan had planned to use other recording devices to secretly record meetings in other parts of the office. Early this month, according to the Justice Department, OpenAI security employees found a similar recording device in a bag he had left inside one of its corporate buildings.
According to a LinkedIn profile connected to Mr Alfozan, he worked as an engineering lead at OpenAI on AI agent software. The profile says he has worked part-time as a partner at Saudi Arabia-based venture capital firm Raed Ventures since 2025, and previously as a senior systems engineer at Meta Platforms.
Mr Alfozan attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2011 to 2016 where he studied computer science and engineering, and the University of California, Berkeley, from 2023 to 2025 to study for a master’s degree in data science, the profile states.
OpenAI said it has alerted the FBI and that the investigation is continuing.
According to the FBI’s criminal complaint, the device was a Seeed Xiao ESP32-S3 Sense, which was described as a “thumb-sized development board with a detachable camera sensor, digital microphone and microSD storage”. A device by that name and description appeared to be for sale for $14 from the website seeedstudio.com as of Tuesday.
Lennart Koopmann, founder of cyber security firm Nzyme, said the device Mr Alfozan allegedly used appears to be built on “a hobbyist circuit board”, and noted features such as the microphone, and the ability to save recordings to a memory card and send audio wirelessly over short distances via Wi-Fi.
“That makes it cheap and easy to hide, and catching one takes either equipment that watches the airwaves for unfamiliar devices or, if its wireless is switched off, someone physically searching the rooms,” Mr Koopmann said.
Mr Alfozan is scheduled to appear before Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse in federal court in San Francisco on October 19.
