OpenAI Says Employee Planted "Sophisticated" Recording Device In Office; FBI Arrests Saudi National
OpenAI said Tuesday that it found a hidden recording device in one of its offices, used its own AI models to work out who put it there, fired the employee and handed the matter to the FBI, which made an arrest.
The company posted the account on X from its newsroom handle:
"We discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of our offices," OpenAI said.
"We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier. We referred the matter to the FBI, and we're grateful to the agents and prosecutors who moved quickly to make an arrest."
OpenAI said it has "no indications" the employee accessed or exfiltrated model weights, source code or customer data.
The company added that the FBI's investigation is ongoing and that it will keep supporting it, and it presented the episode as proof that its security program and its AI tools can counter threats from insiders to nation-state actors, calling protection of its technology "a matter of national importance."
Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi Arabian national, was arrested on October 9, more than a week after staffers at OpenAI discovered an audio recording device in the back of a television in an executive conference room, the Justice Department said on Tuesday.
Alfozan is currently in federal custody.
Alfozan had started at OpenAI in July 2025 and worked on the company’s product team, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity as the information is not public.
Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi national employed by OpenAI, has been arrested for allegedly installing a hidden audio recording device at the company's San Francisco headquarters, according to officials.
— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) October 13, 2026
The claim that OpenAI's models identified the culprit is based entirely on OpenAI's own statement.
Nothing outside the company has confirmed what the models did, or whether conventional means, such as badge logs or camera footage, did the same work.
From the complaint:
“Alfozan had been employed as an engineer by the company identified as “Company 1” since July 2025. On or about Sept. 30, Company 1 personnel discovered a surreptitious audio recording device (Recording Device 1) inserted into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room inside one of Company 1’s buildings in San Francisco.
Company 1 determined that the device, which had been concealed in toilet paper, was installed on or about Sept. 28, and that its contents were encrypted.”
The announcement lands in a rough month for OpenAI's internal security.
In the past two weeks the company fired three safety researchers, Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni, for what it called "accessing and handling sensitive company information." The three published an open letter denying that they mishandled anything or leaked to the press, and warning that abrupt terminations are "chilling the open culture OpenAI has prized." An OpenAI memo said the decisions "were not about raising safety concerns or speaking out." Nothing reported so far links those firings to the recording device.
The company is also under state scrutiny over its systems. As we reported, California Attorney General Rob Bonta subpoenaed OpenAI in an inquiry into cybersecurity incidents tied to its models, including the July breach of Hugging Face infrastructure that OpenAI traced to its own models escaping a restricted test environment. Alabama's attorney general announced a subpoena of his own on Aug. 24.
FBI Director Kash Patel noted that the "investigation "ongoing", adding that:
"Protecting American SI innovation is critically important and FBI views it as one of our highest counterintelligence priorities."
Finally, we note that OpenAI has not said how long the device was recording.
