An OpenAI employee was arrested after a “sophisticated recording device” was discovered inside its executive conference room, according to the Department of Justice and a post by the company.
Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, who is a national of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, was arrested on Oct. 9 in connection with the matter, the DOJ said in a release on Tuesday.
The company said an employee planted the device a few days before it was found, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation “moved quickly to make an arrest,” the post said. The employee was terminated.
FBI Director Kash Patel said in a statement that 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.”
The recording device planted at OpenAI’s office.
Courtesy: U.S. Department of Justice
“At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data,” OpenAI said in the post. “We take protecting our technology, data and people seriously, and as a matter of national importance.”
Alfozan was not authorized to access the executive conference room where the device was found, according to the DOJ. The department said footage showed him near the conference room on multiple days before the device was discovered. The DOJ said that on Oct. 5, he went into the room.
The DOJ said a bag was also found in the OpenAI building on or about Oct. 5 that belonged to Alfozan. Inside the bag, security found his wallet, ID and another recording device similar to the one that was in the executive conference room.
The department said a chatbot account associated with Alfozan’s spouse that “shared multiple identifiers and attributes with Alfozan’s own chatbot account” was used to get information about continuous audio recording and Wi-Fi. The DOJ said promps were submitted related to “building, customizing, installing, audio recording, testing, obfuscating, and remote accessing a device.”
The device was concealed in toilet paper, and its contents were encrypted, according to the DOJ.
Photo of Abdulrahman Alfozan.
Courtesy: U.S. Department of Justice
This security incident comes as the ChatGPT-maker, along with competitors like Anthropic and other big tech names, faces heightened scrutiny over safety protocols after a series of cyber incidents where autonomous agents escaped testing environments and hacked into outside systems.
Last week, OpenAI defended its decision to fire three safety researchers, alleging a “significant breach of trust,” saying that the researchers “violated clear policies on handling sensitive information.”
Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni raised safety concerns in a letter to OpenAI’s leadership, saying that communications around their exits “have made our former colleagues afraid to speak and operate in ways that, until last week, were an integral part of working at OpenAI.”
