Saudi employee arrested for allegedly hiding bug in OpenAI office

SAN FRANCISCO: A Saudi employee of OpenAI was arrested after an investigation found that they had secretly planted a recording device in one of its San Francisco offices, the tech company and federal prosecutors said on Tuesday.

"We discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of our offices" and "referred the matter to the FBI," OpenAI told AFP in a statement.

OpenAI's security team found the device late last month, and the employee, a Saudi national, was arrested on Oct 9, the US Justice Department said.

Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old engineer, had worked for OpenAI since July 2025 and allegedly wrapped a USB device in toilet paper and inserted it into a television located in an "executive conference room", according to a Justice Department statement.

Alfozan was allegedly caught on camera "near" the conference room multiple times but was not authorised to participate in meetings held there.

He used a "productivity tool" to search for more information about OpenAI's office buildings, meeting rooms, calendars, schedules and people's locations, according to the statement.

A chatbot account connected to his spouse also allegedly contained queries related to remote audio recording and encrypting SD cards.

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"This serious situation underscores why winning the global super intelligence race is a national security prerogative," Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton said in the statement.

"The intelligence community remains committed to safeguarding America's cutting-edge intellectual property from foreign threats," Clayton added.

The arrest and allegations come amid a fierce global race to dominate the artificial intelligence (AI) market.

Saudi Arabia's state-backed AI firm Humain invested US$3 billion in Elon Musk's xAI shortly before the American billionaire's space company, SpaceX, acquired the AI division in February.

Now known as SpaceXAI, the division announced last year that it was teaming up with Humain to build a 500-megawatt data centre in Saudi Arabia.