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

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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.

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“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.”

” 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.


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