Saudi OpenAI engineer arrested for allegedly planting $14 recording device in company office

An OpenAI employee has been arrested for allegedly planting a listening device in an executive meeting room. According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), 35-year-old Abdulrahman Alfozan, a national of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, allegedly installed a covert listening device in the back of a television used in the meeting room and covered it with toilet paper on or about Sept. 28, which was discovered a couple of days later. The FBI’s criminal complaint listed the device as a Seeed Xiao ESP32-S3 Sense, which is available on the seeedstudio.com website for $14 and listed for $24 on Amazon.

“According to the complaint unsealed today, Abdulrahman Alfozan allegedly concealed a covert recording device inside his employer’s executive conference room to secretly capture sensitive communications about the company’s super intelligence technology,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in the statement. “Protecting American SI innovation is essential to safeguarding our nation’s economic strength and national security, and the FBI views that mission as one of our highest counterintelligence priorities.”

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(Image credit: Department of Justice)

(Image credit: Department of Justice)

The FBI described the Seeed Xiao ESP32-S3 Sense as a “thumb-sized development board with a detachable camera sensor, digital microphone, and microSD storage.” Seeed Studio advertises the tiny device as suitable for embedded machine learning, like intelligent voice and vision AI, although it’s unclear if Alfozan used its video recording capabilities because of its hidden location. Nevertheless, its built-in microphone and support for 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and BLE should allow him to surreptitiously download any recordings it may have made without physically retrieving the device. Still, Alfozan was reportedly captured on Oct. 5 looking at the back of the television where the device was installed. Furthermore, OpenAI security inspected Alfozan’s unattended bag and allegedly discovered another recording device similar to what was installed in the meeting room alongside his wallet and ID.

The OpenAI engineer reportedly used a productivity tool to find information about OpenAI’s offices, meeting rooms, calendars, external partner meetings, and the locations of its “leadership and exec.” Aside from that, he allegedly used a chatbot under his spouse’s account, which was incidentally closely related to his own, to research how to build, customize, install, test, hide, and remotely access a sound recording device. Some of his inquiries included “build a continuous audio recorder,” “customize Wi-Fi connectivity,” “improve audio and live listening,” and “encrypt the SD card.” Furthermore, the DOJ said that the same chatbot account submitted prompts specifically related to the recording device found installed in the meeting room, including its custom header and unique MAC address.

It’s unclear yet if Alfozan was acting individually, for another AI company, or for a nation-state. Anthropic and OpenAI have accused Chinese AI labs multiple times of distillation attacks, but this is the first time that we’re hearing of a person getting arrested for installing a monitoring device inside the offices of an American AI lab. The FBI said that it’s still investigating the case, though, probably to determine if he’s acting alone or if he’s connected to a wider conspiracy of commercial and industrial espionage involving artificial intelligence labs. In the meantime, Alfozan is currently facing up to five years in prison plus a $250,000 fine if convicted, followed by a three-year supervised release.

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