OpenAI Engineer Charged After Hidden Recording Device Found in Executive Conference Room

Federal prosecutors in San Francisco have charged an OpenAI engineer with trying to secretly record conversations in an executive conference room at the company's headquarters. The U.S. attorney's office announced the case Tuesday.

Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national, was arrested Friday and charged with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications. He made his first appearance in federal court Tuesday and remains in custody. Prosecutors say he has worked at OpenAI since July 2025, and court documents show he has been a legal permanent resident of the United States since September 2020.

According to the criminal complaint, OpenAI personnel found the device on Sept. 30. It was plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in the conference room and had been hidden in toilet paper. The company concluded it was installed around Sept. 28, and its contents were encrypted. Prosecutors say meetings in the room often covered confidential technical, commercial and strategic matters, including proprietary research, product plans and government engagements. Surveillance footage placed Alfozan near the room on several dates before the discovery, although he was not authorized to enter it or attend meetings there.

Prosecutors also describe a trail of digital activity. Before the device was installed, Alfozan allegedly used a productivity tool to ask about OpenAI's building addresses, meeting rooms, room capacities and calendars, along with the locations of leadership and outside partner meetings. A chatbot account tied to his spouse, which shared identifiers with his own, submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 about building, installing, hiding and remotely accessing a recording device, prosecutors said. Queries allegedly included how to "build a continuous audio recorder" and "encrypt the SD card." On Sept. 27 and 28, the account asked about the specific device later found, including its unique MAC address.

The complaint says that on Oct. 5, Alfozan entered the conference room and appeared to look behind the television. That day, he allegedly left a bag unattended in a printer. Security staff who opened it found his wallet and ID, plus a second recording device similar to the first, and he later told company officials he had misplaced the bag. An FBI affidavit says the device had a recording microcontroller and had been customized to obscure stored data. When Alfozan retrieved the bag on Oct. 6, the device was gone. He reported that his credit card, about $500, two AirPods, headphones, sunglasses and a power bank had been stolen, but did not mention the recorder, the affidavit said.

Court documents identify the device as a Seeed XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense, a thumb-sized development board with a digital microphone, a detachable camera sensor and microSD storage, sold by Amazon for $23.99. OpenAI described it as sophisticated and designed to evade detection, and said it has evidence that Alfozan intended to place other recorders in sensitive spaces. The company said its technical surveillance countermeasures team found the device during a sweep, and that employees used its AI models to identify the device and analyze forensic images of its storage before referring the matter to the FBI.

OpenAI said Alfozan was a member of its product team. It said it timed his firing with the FBI to avoid disrupting the investigation, and he was terminated Friday, the day of his arrest. After Sept. 30, the company gradually restricted his access, then suspended his physical and network access, placed him on leave and secured his company-issued equipment. OpenAI said it has no indication he improperly accessed or took model weights, source code or customer data, or that product safety or customer information was compromised.

"For us it is a matter of national security," U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian said in a statement. FBI Director Kash Patel said protecting American AI innovation is among the bureau's top counterintelligence priorities, and Scott Schelble, special agent in charge of the San Francisco field office, said the agency is committed to protecting sensitive research and proprietary technology.

A LinkedIn profile matching Alfozan's name lists him as engineering lead on OpenAI's AI agents platform and a venture partner at Riyadh-based RAED Ventures since 2025. It also lists earlier roles at Nash, Meta and Reach Labs, and a master's degree in data science from UC Berkeley. RAED Ventures did not respond to The Standard's inquiries, and a man at Alfozan's Millbrae home said the family did not wish to speak to reporters.

If convicted, Alfozan faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, followed by three years of supervised release. A detention hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse is scheduled for Oct. 19.