An OpenAI engineer was arrested for hiding a toilet paper-wrapped recording device in a conference room

U.S. federal agents arrested Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi national and OpenAI engineer, for allegedly installing a hidden audio recording device in an executive conference room at the company's San Francisco office. According to the Justice Department, Alfozan had worked at OpenAI since July 2025. OpenAI's security team discovered the sophisticated device late last month and referred the matter to the FBI.

The Justice Department stated that Alfozan allegedly wrapped a USB device in toilet paper and inserted it into a television within the conference room. He was reportedly caught on camera near the room multiple times despite not being authorized to participate in meetings held there. Investigators found that he used a productivity tool to search for information regarding office buildings, meeting rooms, calendars, and employee locations.

Additionally, a chatbot account linked to Alfozan's spouse allegedly contained queries about encrypting memory cards and remote audio recording.

Meetings held in the room where the device was located included discussions regarding government engagements, product plans, and proprietary research. Techmeme reported that court filings identify the device used as a Seeed Xiao ESP32-S3 Sense dev board.

Brief written by urgent.news from Quartz, Japan Times, Free Malaysia Today, The Korea Times, Techmeme — 5 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.