FBI Nabs Saudi National Accused Of Hiding Bug In Toilet Paper To Spy On AI Giant’s Inner Sanctum

A Saudi artificial intelligence engineer is facing federal charges after allegedly planting a bug inside one of America’s top technology labs.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi Arabian national and OpenAI engineer, on Friday for reportedly hiding an audio recording device in the company’s San Francisco executive conference room, the Department of Justice announced in a press release Tuesday. The arrest is the latest security incident at OpenAI, whose agents previously breached AI-startup Hugging Face in addition to other outside systems.

“Abdulrahman 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 (SI) technology,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in the DOJ’s Tuesday press release, using a new term for AI promoted by the Trump administration. “Protecting American SI innovation is essential to safeguarding our nation’s economic strength and national security.”

Alfozan wrapped the recording device in toilet paper, then plugged it into a USB port behind a television in the conference room around Sept. 28, the DOJ said in the release. Security footage showed the OpenAI engineer near the room on several occasions before the device was discovered, even though he was not authorized to enter it.

A photo of Alfozan, shared in a post on X, depicts him looking behind the television where the device was placed.

Alfozan’s spouse was linked to a chatbot account in which the user asked how to create and install a “continuous audio recorder.” between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30, the press release stated.

“The intelligence community remains committed to safeguarding America’s cutting-edge intellectual property from foreign threats,” Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton stated in the press release.

The DOJ National Security Division’s counterintelligence unit is assisting with the prosecution, according to the press release.

“We discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of our offices,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier.”