FBI: OpenAI Engineer Built Spy Device With Wife's Chatbot Prompts

A 35-year-old OpenAI engineer faces up to five years in federal prison after the FBI says he hid an AI-assisted recording device behind a television in an executive conference room at the company's San Francisco offices on or about Sept. 28.

Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi national and U.S. legal resident since September 2020, was arrested Oct. 9 — three days before a one-way flight he, his wife and a third family member had booked from San Francisco to Saudi Arabia via Istanbul. Court documents unsealed Tuesday charge him with one count under the federal Wiretap Act.

The case is built on chatbot logs, cameras and a memory card nobody has been able to read.

What did the chatbot prompts ask for?

The prompts read like a project checklist. Between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30, an AI chatbot account linked to Alfozan's wife received instructions to build "a continuous audio recorder" with "live listening" and "downloading/deleting recordings." The prompts asked the user to encrypt the SD card, make the USB output "power-only," and develop "a second unit and speech-triggered recording," then "a third unit." The final instruction: "apply final protection and silence boot output."

It is still unknown whether the chatbot was OpenAI's ChatGPT. The complaint does not charge Alfozan's wife.

The wife's account was not the only tool involved. About six weeks before the device appeared, court documents say Alfozan used an internal OpenAI productivity agent to find which meeting rooms held six or more people and which rooms would host high-powered meetings.

"How about external partners, where would those usually meet with," Alfozan prompted the agent, according to court documents.

Why that specific room?

The FBI agent's affidavit explains the target selection. After prompting the productivity agent, Alfozan allegedly chose the conference room because meetings there would "frequently involve discussions of highly confidential technical, commercial, and strategic information, including proprietary research, product plans, and business-development opportunities."

The room "typically is used for internal leadership meetings…as well as external briefings with government officials and business counterparts," the affidavit reads. Alfozan had no access to it. Only executives and their assistants could reserve the space.

OpenAI has not answered Fortune's request for comment on whether it saw Alfozan's prompts before staff found the device.

What did investigators actually find?

Staff discovered the device on Sept. 30, wrapped in toilet paper and tucked behind a TV. It was a Seeed XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense — a thumb-sized circuit board with a microphone and microSD storage, made by a Shenzhen-based manufacturer.

OpenAI made a forensic copy of the memory card. "None of the files on it could be recovered or decrypted," the FBI agent wrote. OpenAI and the Justice Department have described the contents as encrypted; the affidavit says only that they "may have been." It remains unknown whether the device captured any conversation.

The rest of the evidence is circumstantial but dense:

• OpenAI had no camera in the room when the device went in.
• CCTV placed Alfozan near the room on 10 different days in September.
• On Sept. 28, the day the device's firmware was compiled, he was there from 2:18 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
• After the FBI and OpenAI began cooperating, a camera was installed in the room by Oct. 5.

That camera caught Alfozan at 1:20:47 p.m. on Oct. 5, checking behind the TV. The same day, he left a bag in a printer room. Security searched it, found his wallet, his ID and a second Seeed recording board, and removed the board. Alfozan reported the bag lost, collected it from lost and found around noon the next day, then sent a written note about what he called stolen items.

"A few items were stolen: one credit card, cash (~$500), 2 AirPods, 1 headphone, sunglasses, power bank." He did not ask about either recording device. CCTV then showed him moving items into a Target shopping bag.

What are the consequences?

Prosecutors want Alfozan held without bail. They wrote that he "has the means — and will have an incentive — to flee the United States sooner if he learns about this case before he is arrested." The government's cover sheet lists deportation among possible penalties.

The complaint does not charge trade-secret theft or economic espionage, and it does not allege a foreign tie. But a trial attorney from the National Security Division's Counterintelligence and Export Control Section is assisting the prosecution, and the sealing motion allows prosecutors to share files with "any other law enforcement and intelligence agencies as may be necessary for investigative purposes."

Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton said the intelligence community is committed to protecting American intellectual property "from foreign threats." FBI Director Kash Patel called protecting "American SI innovation" one of the bureau's "highest counterintelligence priorities."

OpenAI said in a post on X that it had "no indications" Alfozan took model weights, source code or customer data.

Under the Speedy Trial Act, prosecutors have 30 days from the arrest to indict, and a grand jury can add charges. Alfozan made his initial appearance Tuesday and returns to court Oct. 19 for a detention hearing — the first checkpoint in a case where an internal AI tool allegedly helped an employee pick the room, and an external chatbot allegedly helped him bug it.

By Daniel Okafor