On September 30, OpenAI employees opening up an executive conference room at the company's San Francisco office found an audio recording device wrapped in toilet paper and plugged into a USB port on the back of a television. Its contents were encrypted. The company concluded it had been installed two days earlier.
On Tuesday, October 13, the man accused of putting it there made his first appearance in federal court in San Francisco. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California identified him as Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national who had worked as an engineer at OpenAI since July 2025. He was arrested on Friday, October 9, and has since been fired.
The charge is using, or attempting to use, an electronic, mechanical or other device to intercept oral communications, under 18 U.S.C. § 2511(1)(b). It carries a maximum of five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release. A complaint is an allegation, not a conviction, and Alfozan is presumed innocent unless the government proves its case.
What the complaint describes
According to the prosecutors' account, the room was not one Alfozan had any business being in. Security camera footage placed him near it on several dates before the device turned up, even though he had no authority to enter it or to attend the meetings held there — sessions that, the office says, routinely covered confidential technical, commercial and strategic matters.
The complaint also says that in the days before September 28 he used a workplace productivity tool to ask about building addresses, meeting rooms, room capacities, calendars, and where leadership and partner meetings took place.
A second strand of the allegation concerns a chatbot account registered to his spouse, which the complaint says shared identifiers with his own. Between September 24 and 30, prosecutors say, that account received prompts about building, installing, testing and concealing an audio recording device. Two of them, dated September 27 and 28, referred to the header and the MAC address of the specific device later recovered.
By then OpenAI had left the recorder in place and added a camera. On October 5, the complaint says, footage captured Alfozan entering the room and looking behind the television. The same day, the company's security staff found an unattended bag he had left in a different room; inside were a similar recording device, his wallet and his identification.
How it was found
OpenAI said it used its own models to analyze the device and trace its origin, which is how it arrived at the employee who had planted it. The company told TechCrunch there were "no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights," and has also said the same of source code and customer data.
The company described what it found as a "sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of our offices," reported it to the FBI, and terminated the employee. A spokesman, Nate Evans, told TechCrunch that Alfozan had joined in July 2025 and worked on the product team.
"A matter of national security"
The language from the government was notably broad for a single-count wiretap complaint. U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian said that "for us it is a matter of national security." FBI Director Kash Patel said the bureau "views that mission as one of our highest counterintelligence priorities," and described the aim of the device as capturing sensitive communications about the company's technology.
Scott Schelble, the special agent in charge of the FBI's San Francisco field office, said the bureau "remains steadfast in its commitment to protecting sensitive research and proprietary technology."
What the complaint does not say is what the recordings were for, or whether anyone outside the company was to receive them. No motive has been established, and the FBI investigation is continuing.
The case is being handled by the National Security, Cyber & Special Prosecutions Section of the U.S. Attorney's Office. Alfozan is due back in court on October 19 for a detention hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse.
Reporting from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California, TechCrunch and the Associated Press.
