SAN FRANCISCO — The FBI arrested an employee of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI last week after the company discovered a “sophisticated” recording device in an executive conference room at its offices.
Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old citizen of Saudi Arabia who has been working at OpenAI since July 2025, was arrested Oct. 9 and appeared in federal court on Tuesday. He was charged with using a listening device to “intercept oral communications,” the Justice Department said in a statement.
OpenAI is one of a small handful of companies at the cutting edge of developing highly capable artificial intelligence models. The company and its rivals have strict security protocols, including limiting employee access to certain parts of its offices. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
The Justice Department release did not make a direct statement about Alfozan’s motives but framed the arrest as important for national security. Tech leaders and politicians have frequently warned that AI companies are high-priority targets for foreign intelligence agencies as they seek to improve the AI capabilities of their own nations for economic and military purposes.
“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 Justice Department statement. “The intelligence community remains committed to safeguarding America’s cutting-edge intellectual property from foreign threats.”
In a criminal complaint filed Oct. 8 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and made public Tuesday, the government said the conference room where Alfozan allegedly planted the listening device was reserved for executives and used for meetings with government officials and other business leaders.
The complaint shows examples of prompts Alfozan typed into a chatbot as he apparently researched conference rooms inside OpenAI, including asking where in the office “external partners” would meet with company representatives.
OpenAI found the audio recording device during a security sweep of an executive conference room on Sept. 30, a spokesperson for the company said. OpenAI said it had evidence that the employee planned to place other recording devices in its offices. The company contacted the FBI and began doing extra security checks, the spokesperson said.
Surveillance-camera footage showed Alfozan near the conference room on multiple occasions, and on Oct. 5 he entered and appeared to look behind the television, the Justice Department said. That same day, OpenAI staff searched his bag after it was left unattended and found a second recording device. He was arrested four days later, according to the department.
OpenAI said in a statement posted on X that it had “no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating” company code or customer data.
The company said that after the listening device was discovered, it had used its own AI technology to “understand the device and where it had come from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier.” In its news release, the Justice Department said OpenAI determined the recording device had been placed around Sept. 28.
Alfozan’s arrest comes after the January conviction of Chinese national Linwei Ding, who is accused by the FBI of stealing plans for AI-focused computer chips while working for Google. Ding was convicted of economic espionage and theft of trade secrets. His espionage conviction was later overturned after a judge said there was insufficient evidence that Ding had planned to help the Chinese government, rather than use Google’s secrets to kick-start a start-up of his own.
In 2019, the Justice Department charged a Saudi national who worked at the social media company Twitter, now called X, with spying for Saudi Arabia by accessing the company’s information on dissidents who use the platform. He fled the United States before being arrested, but an American citizen was later convicted of helping spy for Saudi Arabia.
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