OpenAI said Tuesday that it found a hidden recording device in one of its offices, used its own AI models to work out who put it there, fired the employee and handed the matter to the FBI, which made an arrest.
The company posted the account on X from its newsroom handle:
"We discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of our offices," OpenAI said.
"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. We referred the matter to the FBI, and we're grateful to the agents and prosecutors who moved quickly to make an arrest."
OpenAI said it has "no indications" the employee accessed or exfiltrated model weights, source code or customer data.
The company added that the FBI's investigation is ongoing and that it will keep supporting it, and it presented the episode as proof that its security program and its AI tools can counter threats from insiders to nation-state actors, calling protection of its technology "a matter of national importance."
Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi Arabian national, was arrested on October 9, more than a week after staffers at OpenAI discovered an audio recording device in the back of a television in an executive conference room, the Justice Department said on Tuesday.
Alfozan is currently in federal custody.
Alfozan had started at OpenAI in July 2025 and worked on the company’s product team, ac
