An engineer at OpenAI has been accused of secretly installing a recording device in a conference room in what officials said Tuesday was an attempt to record sensitive conversations about the company’s technology.
The employee was identified as a 35-year-old Saudi citizen Abdulrahman AlfozanAccording to a criminal complaint filed in federal court in San Francisco, he was arrested on Friday, a week after the ChatGPT maker discovered an audio recording device hidden in the conference room.
The complaint did not identify the company, but the company confirmed in a separate statement that it had discovered a “sophisticated recording device hidden in one of our offices,” reported the find to the FBI and fired the employee.
“We used our models to understand the device and its origins and determined that a specific employee had planted it several days earlier. We have referred the matter to the FBI and are grateful to the agents and prosecutors who acted quickly to make an arrest. The FBI’s investigation is ongoing and we will continue to support their work,” an OpenAI spokesperson said.
“At this time, we have no indication that this individual inappropriately accessed or exfiltrated model weights, source code, or customer data. The employee has been terminated,” the statement said.
The complaint does not detail what Alfozan might have wanted to do with the communications data collected.
Alfozan made his first court appearance Tuesday and was charged with using or attempting to use an electronic, mechanical or other device to intercept oral communications. It was not immediately clear whether he had an attorney who could speak on his behalf.
According to the complaint, the recording device was found on Sept. 30 hidden in toilet paper and plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in the conference room.
Although the conference room where the recording device was found did not have a camera at the time of installation, video surveillance footage at the company’s offices showed that Alfozan was near the conference room a half-dozen times in the past month even though he did not have permission to enter the room, the complaint says.
According to the FBI, the company then inserted a camera into the room, which last week captured Alfozan entering and checking behind the television, where the recording device was installed.
In the complaint, he also used a productivity tool to make multiple inquiries about the company’s building addresses, meeting rooms, meeting room capacity and calendars.
Before his arrest last week, the complaint says, Alfozan left an unattended bag in another room in the building that contained his wallet, identification and another recording device.
