FBI Arrests OpenAI Engineer Over Hidden Listening Device

Federal authorities have arrested 35-year-old Abdulrahman Alfozan, a former OpenAI engineer and permanent US legal resident since 2020, for allegedly planting a covert recording device in a restricted corporate meeting room. Hired in July 2025, Alfozan reportedly placed a Chinese-made Seeed XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense microcontroller—wrapped in toilet paper and plugged into a conference room television—on September 28. It took OpenAI two days to discover the bug on September 30, after which internal security confirmed its microSD card contained an encrypted file system designed to hide intercepted audio.

An affidavit from FBI special agent Lydia Liang details that Alfozan began exhibiting suspicious behavior in August, when he queried an OpenAI productivity agent to map sensitive executive meetings. CCTV footage captured him lingering outside the conference room on 10 different days in September alone. On October 5, OpenAI installed a hidden camera that caught Alfozan attempting to retrieve the bug. That same day, he reported a lost bag in a printer room, where security recovered a second Seeed device. OpenAI quietly phased out Alfozan's system access before coordinating his termination with his arrest by federal agents.

If convicted of unlawful recording charges, Alfozan faces up to 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Chatbot logs linked to his spouse's account revealed searches on continuous recording, voice triggers, and SD card encryption using the device's MAC address. FBI Director Kash Patel emphasized that protecting American innovation at frontier labs is "one of our highest counterintelligence priorities," while US Attorney Craig Missakian pledged ongoing prosecution against Silicon Valley trade secret theft.