OpenAI engineer accused of using ChatGPT to design hidden audio recorder in San Francisco office
Federal prosecutors allege that Abdulrahman Alfozan, an OpenAI engineer, used a ChatGPT account linked to his wife to create a covert recording device placed in a conference room, leading to his arrest and a wiretap charge.
Federal investigators say Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old OpenAI engineer and Saudi national who has lived in the United States since 2020, used prompts sent from a ChatGPT account belonging to his wife to design a miniature audio recorder. Court documents unsealed on Tuesday detail a series of prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 that instructed the AI to build a continuous-recording device, add live-listening capability, encrypt stored data and conceal the hardware.
According to the complaint, Alfozan placed the device behind a television in an executive conference room at OpenAI’s San Francisco campus on or about Sept. 28, after using an internal OpenAI productivity agent to identify rooms that host high-level meetings. The room, which is typically reserved for internal leadership briefings and external briefings with government officials and business partners, was not accessible to Alfozan without executive clearance.
OpenAI discovered the device on Sept. 30 during a routine sweep. The hardware, identified as a Seeed XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense board with a microphone and microSD storage, was wrapped in toilet paper. A forensic copy of its memory card yielded encrypted files that could not be decrypted. CCTV footage captured Alfozan near the room on multiple occasions in September, including a video on Sept. 28 showing him checking behind the TV.
Alfozan was arrested on Oct. 9 and faces a single count under the federal Wiretap Act, which carries a maximum five-year prison term. The government has asked that he be denied bail and listed deportation as a possible penalty. He is scheduled for a detention hearing on Oct. 19.
"Protecting American scientific and industrial innovation is one of the bureau’s highest counterintelligence priorities," FBI Director Kash Patel said.
OpenAI said it has no indication that Alfozan accessed model weights, source code, or customer data. The case remains under investigation, with prosecutors seeking to share the encrypted files with other law-enforcement and intelligence agencies as needed.