OpenAI. Saudi engineer detained for internal espionage

An OpenAI engineer was arrested and charged with a crime after installing an audio recording device in one of the company's meeting rooms in San Francisco, California. Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi citizen, was arrested by authorities on October 9th and appeared in a federal court this Tuesday for an initial hearing. Days before, the man used the woman's account to send prompts related to internal espionage and how to "build a continuous audio recorder". Alfozan has been working as an engineer at OpenAI since July 2025. According to the statement released by the U.S. Department of Justice, the company's employees discovered the recording device on September 30, 2026. The device was wrapped in toilet paper and inserted into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room in one of the OpenAI buildings in San Francisco. Upon examining the device, the company determined that it had been installed two days earlier and that its contents were encrypted. But the most curious thing was how OpenAI reached the suspect. In addition to detecting Alfozan's presence near the conference room through CCTV footage from the days before the discovery of the device, the company tracked the queries made by the employee before September 28th. Alfozan used a productivity tool to make several searches about "addresses of OpenAI buildings, meeting rooms, capacities and agendas of these rooms, as well as meeting locations of leadership/executives and external partners," according to the statement issued by the Department of Justice. By accessing the woman's chatbot account, OpenAI discovered prompts sent between September 24th and 30th related to the "construction, personalization, installation, audio recording, testing, concealment, and remote access of a device," including queries about "building a continuous audio recorder," "personalizing Wi-Fi connectivity…," "improving audio and real-time listening," and "encrypting the SD card." In the following days, the same account sent prompts directly related to the device found in the meeting room. The final evidence was a CCTV image captured on October 5th, when Alfozan entered the meeting room and looked behind the television device where the device was inserted. On the same day, the man had left a suitcase unsupervised in another room, where the OpenAI security team found Alfozan's identification as well as another similar audio recording device already installed. According to OpenAI, the meeting room where the man installed the device is a space that frequently receives discussions about "highly confidential technical, commercial, and strategic information, including proprietary research, product plans and business development opportunities, as well as non-public information about technical progress and strategic decisions, capabilities, priorities, interactions with the Government, and OpenAI's business relations." Abdulrahman Alfozan was accused of attempting to use an electronic, mechanical, or other type of device to intercept verbal communications. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000, followed by three years of supervised release. The man is currently in federal custody and his next hearing is scheduled for October 19th. [Annie has known the Minister of the Interior of Cuba for a long time, but the passion that unites them is relatively recent. It is at this time that Zé Manel, as she calls him, will be implicated in one of Fidel Castro's leadership's greatest scandals. The "Ochoa Case" involves drugs, executions, imprisonment, and the most famous drug trafficker in the world: Pablo Escobar. You can already hear the fifth episode of "The Scandals of a Revolutionary," the new Observador Plus Podcast. It is available on the Observador website, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Youtube.]