An OpenAI engineer has been 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 national, 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 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 personnel found the device Sept. 30. It was plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room and had been concealed in toilet paper, the complaint says. The company determined it was installed around Sept. 28, and its contents were encrypted.
Surveillance footage shows Alfozan near the room on multiple dates before the discovery, though he was not authorized to enter the room or attend meetings there, prosecutors said. Meetings in the room frequently involved confidential technical, commercial, and strategic information, including proprietary research, product plans, and government engagements, according to the complaint.
Before the device was installed, Alfozan used a productivity tool to ask about OpenAI’s building addresses, meeting rooms, room capacities, and calendars, as well as the locations of leadership and outside partner meetings, the complaint alleges.
A chatbot account tied to Alfozan’s spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 about building, installing, obscuring, and remotely accessing a recording device, prosecutors said. Queries included how to “build a continuous audio recorder” and “encrypt the SD card,” prosecutors claimed. On Sept. 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, he allegedly left a bag unattended in a different room. Security personnel who opened it found his wallet and ID, along with a second recording device similar to the first.
“For us it is a matter of national security,” U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian said in a statement.
FBI Director Kash Patel said protecting U.S. AI innovation is among the bureau’s highest 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 National Security, Cyber & Special Prosecutions Section of the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of California.
OpenAI said on X (opens in new tab) that after discovering the device, employees used the company’s AI models to determine what it was and where it came from, and referred the matter to the FBI. The company thanked the 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 for transferring data in a way meant to avoid monitoring. The company said investigators used its models to analyze forensic images of the device’s storage and assess changes in 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 terminated Friday, the day he was arrested. Between Sept. 30 and that date, OpenAI said, it gradually restricted his access to systems and spaces, then suspended his physical and network access, placed him on leave, and secured his company-issued equipment.
A YouTube video last month touted him as the only Saudi employee at OpenAI.
“Honestly, this one 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 one might not want to do, so they can focus on tasks or hobbies they enjoy more or work they take pleaseure in and let it do the tedious task,” Alfozan said later in the video.
A LinkedIn profile that matches Alfozan’s name lists his OpenAI role as engineering lead on the company’s AI agents platform
Before joining OpenAI, he was a founding engineer at Nash, an AI infrastructure company for logistics, from 2022 to August 2025, according to the LinkedIn profile. From 2017 to 2022, he was a senior systems engineer at Meta. His earlier 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.
OpenAI said it has no indication that Alfozan improperly accessed or took model weights, source code, or customer data and has not seen activity that compromised the safety of its products or customers’ information. The company said it will continue to support the FBI’s investigation.
OpenAI said it treats protecting 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 U.S. Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse is set for Oct. 19.
