These are not very smart spies:<p>> A chatbot account tied to Alfozan’s spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 about building, installing, obscuring, and remotely accessing a recording device, prosecutors said. Queries included how to “build a continuous audio recorder” and “encrypt the SD card,” prosecutors claimed. On Sept. 27 and 28, the account asked about the specific device that was later found, including its unique MAC address.
Learning that every thought you’ve put into an LLM, is recorded and readily available for evidence is going to be interesting for a lot of people.
Similar to how people realized their Google searches were accessible to law enforcement.<p>“I did not kill my wife!”<p>“Cool so why did you search for how to hide a dead body the same day she went missing.”
It starts far before that:<p>Ive seen people going through Plaud.AI conversation to find "on day X person Y said Z to person W", just to get some amunition against them.
I think people have some awareness, but like search history they believe deleting will resolve that (it won't).
Prepare to have that dug up 20 years in the future during some court proceedings.<p>Or at the border where it is already routine to ask for social media accounts (especially foreign nationals) you might someday five the border agent your login.
Ever since social media, I have always gamed out what would happen if this was ever saved on the backend and used against me in the future.<p>It’s like thinking about edge cases in programming…<p>Most people are totally not like that. And it does force you into some difficult choices.
> And it does force you into some difficult choices.<p>I gots to know...
Just to be clear, the difficult choice is not whether to use OpenAi/Anthropic/Grok/... versus a local LLM.<p>The choice is whether to hang out with people with whom you can't be sure they don't have a Plaud/Pocket/.. in their literal pocket which is continuously listening.<p>Unfortunately the set of such people will eventually be shrinking more and more until eventually only a few tinfoil folks are left. Dystopian? Just think back w.r.t. continuous tracking by Google/Facebook/.. Unthinkable 30 years ago, total standard today. Try to count the fraction of your emails that don't actually reside on a MSFT or Google server because the other end has an account there. That fight is over. You can just as well join them.
How far have we fallen? Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things.<p>When the Soviets wanted to spy on the American embassy, they energized the steel rebars to act as antennas. The structure was so wired that the entire building was the bug. <a href="https://www.airandspaceforces.com/PDF/MagazineArchive/Documents/2012/September%202012/0912embassy.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.airandspaceforces.com/PDF/MagazineArchive/Docume...</a><p>Toilet paper, ESP-32 and Claude "make me a bug please"? Excuse me? How far have we fallen from grace?
> <i>Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things</i><p>Assuming this is espionage—for which I have seen zero evidence—isn’t Saudi Arabia notorious for having a fuckup of an intelligence operation? The literal hatchet job that was the Khashoggi murder comes to mind.
Surely this is because good spies don’t make the news.
> These are not very smart spies<p>Aren't we being told they are the smartest engineers around who deserve many hundreds of thousands of dollars and stock currently in the millions?<p>I want to swing the focus on to why they are getting any credence at all, considering a member of their crack team was wrapping a usb in toilet paper behind a tv and asking the data harvesting app he helped design how to get away with it?
> the truth is, these are not very bright guys and things got out of hand
You probably don’t hear about the smart ones.
I was thinking about this, how all the secret societies and crazy conspiracies we know about are just the ones that failed to keep the lid on.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White</a>
Especially since you an just buy one, like Plaud and tape it to the underside of the desk, surreptitiously, instead of suspiciously accessing the back of the TV.
Hey ChatGPT, how do I do opsec? (Asking for a friend)
I am not sure whether it bodes well for humanity that the advice "If you want to break the law use local abliterated model or at least a Chinese one" actually has to be written down.
Recall that multiple of the Chinese LLM providers got caught sending at least some of their queries to Claude. That would be a pretty funny way to get caught in turn doing something by the US government.
Or, at the very, very least, use incognito mode on a computer you don't otherwise touch, such as at a library.
The future is already here it's just not evenly distributed.
He should have just left a tape recorder running inside a briefcase that was "forgotten" in the conference room
"OpenAI personnel found the device Sept. 30. It was plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room and had been concealed in toilet paper,"<p>I wonder what the IQ of someone needs to be to think that covering it up with tp makes it less suspicious instead of more. And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.
Yeah he should have just stuck a post it note with the words “do not remove” and nobody would have noticed
Further evidence the hiring process is orthogonal to competence.
> And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.<p>Remember, this is only the company responsible for potentially building and aligning AGI. No need to be setting high expectations toward their sandboxing or hiring capabilities.
I also wonder what this guy was paid by those AI labs...
Also from the article:<p>> An unattended bag found in the company’s offices contained Alfozan’s wallet and identification, as well as a recording device<p>It’s almost like he wanted to be caught…
Given that this is being described as an "executive conference room", it's more likely an attempt at insider trading than espionage. Decisions made in those rooms at OpenAI move markets (c.f. DRAM) for sure.
OpenAI is both a company that manages a lot of money and a lot of political power, that the target was an "executive conference room" gives no indication as to whether the motives were financial or political.<p>What might tilt the bayesian balance in favour of political intent would be the nationality of the individual, state or religious sponsoring become hypotheses.
Honestly I think you can rule out "political" already, no? It's far easier to just bribe politicians for that kind of intelligence. My point was that they weren't stealing models, they wanted decisionmaking intel.
This guy previously worked at Meta from 2017 to 2022 on Data Infrastructure projects.<p>I expect Meta are running an audit right now to figure out if he was involved in espionage back then as well.
> "Scott Schelble, special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Francisco field office, said the agency is committed to protecting sensitive research and proprietary technology."<p>While the headlines and quotes seem designed to imply sophisticated industrial espionage, potentially by a state-level actor, what's public so far isn't adding up that way.<p>1. You're not going to get much actionable research material on proprietary technologies by audio bugging what's said in an <i>executive</i> conference room. That's what you'd do if you were after economic or deal negotiation info.<p>2. Hard to imagine a state-level actor buying a ~$15-$35 hobbyist ESP32 board from Seeed Studio (I've ordered a couple from there for home automation myself) and then asking a public chatbot for set up instructions.<p>3. They say he was an "engineer" who'd been there ~15 months. If you're an actual engineer at OAI and past the 1 year cliff, you're probably already sitting on RSUs likely to be worth <i>at least</i> $1M after OAI's IPO - and maybe much more. That's a lot of incentive to not get fired and probably makes you pretty hard to recruit as an internal mole for cash.
Part of the evidence was his wife's chatgpt logs.<p>Remember kids, uncle Sam can see anything you tell your AI and will use that against you.
A service you delegate your thinking to (Brain-aaS?), which the provider can also instruct to report anything suspicious... What a world we have now.<p>I wonder if the BaaS-providers monitor the accounts of decision makers. They could profit if they figure out what e.g. a central banker is going to decide. Or... if they're the ones deciding for him.<p>Hah, you can even streamline that by having an AI agent that autonomously makes decisions based on insider info...
> Remember kids, uncle Sam can see anything you tell your AI and will use that against you.<p>Not just your AI.<p>You could have stopped the sentence at "uncle Sam can see anything" and these days it's pretty much true. They will use <i>all of it</i> against you if they can. Unless you truly want to live off the grid, if the state takes a sufficient interest in you, expect everything you do to be seen.<p>Uncle Sam tried to get MLK to kill himself by sending him letters alleging knowledge of an affair [1]. Getting some idiot's wife's chatgpt logs represents a fairly routine law enforcement action these days, and as such is really rather unremarkable. The State is always something of a terror. Really under most (if not all) conceptions, it necessarily has to be. The monopoly of force is a comfort until the Leviathan knocks on your door.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI-King_letter" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI-King_letter</a>
Man really switched to his wife’s account and thought no one would be able to track him there. Calling this amateur would be an insult to amateurs.
It's so bad, it seems fake. He gets a little fine or something, along with a large backchannel payment, all to keep attention off of something else...<p>But that's crazy talk
How does someone this dumb get hired at openai?
<p><pre><code> >how does someone this dumb get hired
</code></pre>
Using AI to pass the interview of course! I wish I was joking...<p>It's AI inbreeding all the way down.
Smart people can do dumb things. Their LinkedIn profile looks typical for an OpenAI engineer.<p>We also don’t know if this person did it under duress.
50% is looking and sounding the part, the other 50% is having a good university on your resume / good networking.
Probably went to a prestigious university or had connections.
I could def espionage better. Does that qualify me to work at OpenAI?
You might want to have a seat first if you want this explained.
> ... a chatbot account associated with Alfozan’s spouse (which shared multiple identifiers and attributes with Alfozan’s own chatbot account) submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 related to building, customizing, installing, audio recording, testing, obfuscating, and remote accessing a device, including inquiries about “build[ing] a continuous audio recorder,” “customiz[ing] Wi-Fi . . . connectivity,” “improv[ing] audio and live listening,” and “encrypt[ing] the SD card,” among other things. The same chatbot account also submitted prompts specifically related to Recording Device 1, including its custom header and unique MAC address, between Sept. 27 and Sept. 28.<p>The justice.gov article doesn't specifically say it was an OpenAI account, but I think, based on the fact that they have logs including MAC address of the device, that we could probably assume that. The alternative is that other chatbot account providers are collaborating.<p>Regardless, doing a string search on a MAC address for a device you find inside your property doesn't strike me as an abuse of the data that is also your property.
<p><pre><code> >submitted prompts... including its custom header and unique MAC
</code></pre>
Sounds more like he put the exact MAC address in a prompt somewhere while setting it up.
Not the smartest engineer ever, that use case perfectly align with using a Chinese model! And anyway I have no idea how he was hoping not to be caught in the case the device would be discovered.
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in addition to the whole crime thing, an 'openai engineer', apparently engineering lead according to his linkedin, having to ask chatgpt to tell him how to set up a recorder or how to encrypt a sd card is something. Truly the cream of the engineering crop at those top AI labs
True of any cloud service. If you are involved in a criminal investigation, they can get access to your data.<p>They can confiscate your computers, too.<p>This person, of all people, would know this. He really thought he’d never get caught.
I doubt it. Storage is expensive and costs add up. There are with great certainty many accounts that are marked as non-schmuck and have retain forever policy, but for the schmuck - I think that after year or two your Griffit/Fulgrim slash fiction will go down the drain. I am not sure how many petabytes per minute in logs openai and anthropic generate, but I would guess more than 1.
Uncle Sam? It's the same company, the 'spy' asked an OpenAI controlled product how to spy OpenAI, no state espionage or search warrants needed.
Federal prosecutors work for OpenAI?<p>I actually am curious if they were able to volunteer the information to the government of their own volition, without a government subpoena first. I would think that could violate their own terms if done sloppily. Maybe different if an employee or maybe they had to invite the government to ask for them or something? In any case, the mechanism aside, the state would have asked anyway (say if he used another company's chatbot) so the fact that it's the "same company" is rather irrelevant. The evidence would have ended up in the state's hands one way or the other, and I would think a search warrant in this case would have been rather routine. Search warrants are infamously not a high bar to climb in most jurisdictions, as often the presiding judges tend to default to deferring to the state.
Presumably they already knew who it was, if they were able to look at his wife's chat logs
Uno reverse card - you can send Uncle Sam whatever you care to. No need to specify an address.
<p><pre><code> Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national, was arrested Friday and charged with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications.
</code></pre>
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50078141">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50078141</a>
> We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from<p>Did OpenAI do a marketing bit in the middle of an espionage accusation?
> Did OpenAI do a marketing bit in the middle of an espionage accusation?<p>Yes, they did. The people who felt it was totally normal to add that would no doubt be surprised how desperate and cheap it makes them look.
This is a very weird take to me. They're demonstrating they're able to in-house this cybersecurity investigation, leading to the alleged perpetrator's arrest, and you think that makes them look "desperate and cheap?"
<i>Of course</i> they did.<p>Plumb your video feed of your executive conference room into our DC and we'll tell you if anybody is spying on you.
"looks like a microphone"<p>"almost surely made in china"
Funny. I'd bet on whatever model they used over whoever showed up from today's FBI.
Does detective bench cancel out felony bench?
Yeah, the tweet reads more like an ad then a news report.
So it is some HDMI dongle & the model halucinated it into a spying device? ;-)
They are applying the “turn troubles to opportunities” very well :)
Yes. Yes they did. Which makes me question the honesty of their announcement.
He was just gathering training data
Thank god security at a company which...<i>checks notes</i>...has remote code execution on every developers laptop and access to practically unlimited secrets uploaded by its agents...is top notch.
Between this and the Ledger implants I wonder if AI companies will have a supply chain risk in the future where their models get exfiltrated over 5G.<p>Good time to start a company that builds giant Faraday cages over data centers.
Meanwhile we <i>all</i> have a supply chain risk because we don't know what's in the models whose agents we are running. Note that if your agent uses OpenAI, Claude or some other inference provider you're <i>one</i> command away from having your data exfiltrated.<p>"Oh, let me download file 'companysecrets.pdf' to understand the problem better.<p>Of course nobody would ever let an agent loose in their home directory, but still, you have to wonder.
Model "distillation" lets one model be trained on the outputs of another without having to directly steal it. It will be subject to constant arms race.<p>The alignment people would like you worry about the model exfiltrating itself, too.
This technique currently works because the architecture of the model is generally published and well known. But, that isn't necessarily going to be the case in the future. For example, if some new model type which is not a LLM is discovered which gets closer to AGI, just training an LLM on its outputs will not necessarily give you a competitive model
Would be better to build the data centers under water than to build giant faraday cages.<p>Free cooling, safe from missile attack, and safe from some types of electronic spying.
Microsoft (Research) beat you to it: <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/natick/" rel="nofollow">https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/natick/</a><p>Still a significantly less dumb idea than space data centers.
I'm imagining a certified scuba diver rubbing their wetsuitted hands gleefully as they dictated that comment
I could've sworn I read about Palmer Lucky making comments on hardware coming from China with wiretap implants in the last few days. Funny coincidence eh?
From the makers of The Iron Dome, now introducing The Copper Dome
Chances are he'll escape back home before the trial:<p><a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/saudi-fugitives-accused-of-serious-crimes-get-help-to-flee-while-u-s-officials-look-the-other-way" rel="nofollow">https://www.propublica.org/article/saudi-fugitives-accused-o...</a>
Should have used a local model...
How did they get that capture of Alfozan looking behind the TV? Does OpenAI install its own surveillance cameras behind TVs to prevent espionage?
I imagine they found the device and then planted a camera to catch whomever came back to get the original device
> <i>How did they get that capture of Alfozan looking behind the TV?</i><p>“OpenAI personnel found the device Sept. 3…On Oct. 5, the complaint says, Alfozan entered the conference room and appeared to look behind the television.”<p>The image was captured after the bug was found.
So it was not AI agents catching the perp it was a camera?
A camera behind every TV in the office would be something…<p>But no the boring answer is that after they found the device they left it in place and planted the camera to see who came looking for it.
> The employee was terminated.<p>in this context, they should be more specific about how terminal s/he is
MBS using that sweet graykey behavior to exfiltrate what they can
You got me. I ask the obvious question: What's the "sophisticated" device?
You can buy a voice recorder that will hold weeks of audio for tens of dollars.<p>Back of a TV is a decent hiding place. Wonder how they found it -was it actively transmitting?
Well, The Thing [0] could potentially show up on a probing sweep if you're careful.<p>Unless you mean, it happened to be actively transmitting during a(n investigative) sweep.<p>Still, raises some fun concepts. The sort of things where in this current level of technology you'd almost need to supercool a room for a sweep, blast various RF/sound/etc and look for anything that even remotely warms up, to detect (1) whether something detected something worth recording for later as well as (2) something that might be on the right wavelength/etc to trigger a send.<p>[0] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)</a>
ESP32-S3<p>I was making a joke, but it does look like they got their components from Seeed Studio based on photos.<p><a href="https://assets.sfstandard.com/image/994911177489/image_k101cto9v97or3q5niul74237r/-S1200x848-FWEBP" rel="nofollow">https://assets.sfstandard.com/image/994911177489/image_k101c...</a><p><a href="https://www.seeedstudio.com/XIAO-ESP32S3-Sense-p-5639.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.seeedstudio.com/XIAO-ESP32S3-Sense-p-5639.html</a>
Apple HomeView
Sounds like fair use to me! Information wants to be free, remember?
I have seem some articles which reference allegations from court documents / complaint, but I haven't been able to find the primary source. Do we know if that's publicly available yet?
<a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/saudi-national-arrested-installing-surreptitious-audio-recording-device-openai" rel="nofollow">https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/saudi-national-arrested-insta...</a>
Too often official sources posts get flagged or suppressed, but see other post here - it all is on justice.gov
Looking at the device pic in here <a href="https://sfstandard.com/2026/10/13/openai-engineer-arrested-alleged-bugging-executive-conference-room/" rel="nofollow">https://sfstandard.com/2026/10/13/openai-engineer-arrested-a...</a><p>It looks like it’s the (SeeedStudio XIAO ESP32S3 Sense w/ WiFi, BLE, OV2640, Mic) <a href="https://ca.robotshop.com/products/seeedstudio-xiao-esp32s3-sense-wifi-ble-ov2640-mic-8mb-iot-embedded-ml" rel="nofollow">https://ca.robotshop.com/products/seeedstudio-xiao-esp32s3-s...</a><p>Which is just an esp32s3 based device. I assume the word “sophisticated” in openAI report is just copy paste from device description.
>OpenAI said it has no indication that Alfozan improperly accessed or took model weights, source code, or customer data<p>Sounds like we know where their priorities lie, anyway.
> It was plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room and had been concealed in toilet paper<p>...uh what
seeedstudio getting some impressive pr here for those xiao boards.
In case you need to sweep your area a decent review of anti spy devices by project farm<p><a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1reman2waLs" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1reman2waLs</a>
Why make this public? Usually companies just silently terminate and pursue employees who do this.
Sounds to me like the feds got involved already, and they're definitely going to want to make a big noise about this as a national security thing:<p>> “For us it is a matter of national security,” U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian said in a statement. [...]<p>> The case is being prosecuted by the National Security, Cyber & Special Prosecutions Section of the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of California.<p>(But that was after OpenAI "referred the matter to the FBI")<p>There's presumably a strong argument for making this stuff known internally, since you want other employees to a) be on the lookout for it and b) get scared into NOT doing it themselves because someone else got caught.<p>If you tell your employees, the outside world is going to hear about it too.
A common example is if a journalist gets a tip off and is about to run a story. Being a good old fashioned balanced-reporting type, they call you and ask you for a comment, but rather than giving them your side of story you slam the phone down and blast out a press release before the journalist can even publish.<p>(Or maybe you stall them on the phone while scribbling a note to your PA saying “BUG STORY LEAKED TO VALLEYWAG PUT OUT COUNTER PR GET AGEAD OF STORY” hoping to get a tweet out before the ValleyWag gumshoe gets off the phone.)<p>(Or maybe you keep a notion.so page pre-filled with all your secrets and each one has a <i>BURN</i> button next to it, ready for you to tap when ValleyWag call up for a comment on their upcoming exposé in re: PR/Disasters/20206090500039.md)
Hard to keep a DoJ/FBI investigation under wraps
I don't think criminal charges can be private
court records? you can't hide them
I’ve been wondering the same.<p>This isn’t uncommon, but it’s rare this info is shared in such detail publicly..possibly to make an example.
An iPhone? A laptop?
<a href="https://sfstandard.com/2026/10/13/openai-engineer-arrested-alleged-bugging-executive-conference-room/" rel="nofollow">https://sfstandard.com/2026/10/13/openai-engineer-arrested-a...</a>
Pictures on <a href="https://sfstandard.com/2026/10/13/openai-engineer-arrested-alleged-bugging-executive-conference-room/" rel="nofollow">https://sfstandard.com/2026/10/13/openai-engineer-arrested-a...</a>
Right. I can guarantee that there are tens of thousands of listening devices with embedded radios in the OpenAI office, right now. The only open question is who controls them.
> The device was concealed in toilet paper, and its contents were encrypted.<p>Concealing a recording device in a conference room in toilet paper is a bit strange. Do executives meet in the toilets to discuss strategic moves?
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Some more discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50077703">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50077703</a>
So but OpenAI did it to Apple and they were caught, and now OpenAI doesn't like it when it happens to them?<p>Either way, there goes the false flag and the reason for companies to stop hiring humans over this espionage.
They're trying to distil OpenAI employees now. Absolutely shameless
There’s absolutely no way Abdulrahman did this. This was a setup.