A member of the Saudi military paid for the wife and infant son of the engineer charged with planting a hidden recording device at OpenAI to fly out of the United States the day after his arrest, federal prosecutors said in a court filing on Sunday.
The flights were among a number of new information about the ties of the former OpenAI engineer, Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national, with Saudi officials, according to the filing. Among other things, Mr. Alfozan had been in frequent contact with a member of the Saudi royal family who tried to recruit him to work in Saudi Arabia, the filing said.
In May, the royal family member wrote to Mr. Alfozan, saying “Saudi needs you more” than the United States. Mr. Alfozan replied “100,” according to prosecutors. But Mr. Alfozan said he would not leave OpenAI until he could collect the company stock he had been promised, which was worth $2.2 million when he was hired, according to the filing.
The Saudi government also offered to pay Mr. Alfozan’s bail. In a letter to his lawyer, dated Oct. 14, the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles said it was ready “to cover the full amount of the bail bond” required for his release. Mr. Alfozan’s lawyer filed the letter with the court as part of the request that he be released.
The revelations follow OpenAI’s disclosure this month that it had found a hidden recording device in one of its offices in San Francisco and had traced it back to Mr. Alfozan, who appeared to be planning to place more recording devices in sensitive areas of the artificial intelligence company’s offices. He was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Oct. 9 and charged with trying to secretly record conversations using an electronic device.
Mr. Alfozan has been in jail since then. He is scheduled to appear in federal court in San Francisco at 11 a.m. Pacific time on Monday, when Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse will decide whether he stays in jail while the case moves forward.
The incident has fueled concerns about the security of leading A.I. labs like OpenAI, which create advanced A.I. models that are among the most closely guarded secrets in the U.S. technology industry.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
Prosecutors said in the filing that Mr. Alfozan’s motive might have been to enrich himself or to aid a foreign government, “or both.” Prosecutors said their investigation was continuing and “may result in additional serious charges.”
Mr. Alfozan’s wife, identified as Lujain Alassaf, and son left the United States about 36 hours after his arrest, on a one-way, business-class flight to Doha, Qatar, which was booked and paid for by a Saudi military official, according to the filing. An earlier one-way flight to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, booked and paid for by the Saudi government, was canceled, prosecutors said.
Mr. Alfozan’s wife, whose U.S. student visa recently expired, told F.B.I. agents that her husband planned to return to OpenAI after two months in Saudi Arabia but that he, too, intended to eventually move there permanently, according to the prosecutors.
The Saudi Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
After searching Mr. Alfozan’s home and phone, investigators found electronic parts similar to those in the recording device that was planted, as well as photos of a different concealed device and photos of technology in another conference room used for sensitive meetings, according to the filing.
In court papers filed ahead of Monday’s hearing, Mr. Alfozan’s lawyer, William Pernik, said his client had deep roots in the United States. Mr. Pernik submitted more than 50 letters of support, along with records showing that Mr. Alfozan had applied for U.S. citizenship and was scheduled for a naturalization interview in November. He had also been scheduled to begin two months of paternity leave from OpenAI in October that was set to end in December.
Prosecutors argued that the Saudi government’s help was itself a reason for concern. They said Saudi Arabia has no extradition treaty with the United States and pointed to a previous case in San Francisco in which, they said, the Saudis helped arrange a next-day flight to Saudi Arabia for an employee of Twitter (now known as X) after the company confronted him in 2015 about accessing user data. The employee, Ali Alzabarah, was later charged with spying for Saudi Arabia but has not been arrested. Another employee involved in the scheme, Ahmad Abouammo, was convicted in 2022.
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