About a week. That is how long passed between OpenAI discovering a device behind a television in its San Francisco office and the FBI arresting the employee accused of putting it there on 9 October, TechCrunch reported on 13 October.
Prosecutors named him as Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi national who joined in July 2025 and worked on the product team, according to an OpenAI spokesperson. OpenAI fired him. He is charged with using an electronic device to intercept oral communications and faces up to five years in prison.
Prosecutors said the device was plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room. OpenAI had also placed a camera there, which allegedly recorded him looking behind the set.
OpenAI described the device as having advanced encryption, audio monitoring and a data-transfer mechanism designed to evade monitoring. It said it used its own models to analyse it. TechCrunch noted it is unclear how different the device is from other recorders.
FBI Director Kash Patel said the scheme aimed to capture sensitive communications about the company’s superintelligence technology. OpenAI said that at this time it has no indication Alfozan accessed or took model weights, source code or customer data.
Neither Alfozan nor his lawyer could be reached for comment, and these are accusations, not findings.
Motive is the unresolved part. The report does not say what the device was for, or whether anything was ever recorded.
