Recording device hidden in toilet paper found in top-secret OpenAI meeting room
Ars Technica
1w · 2 min
OpenAI engineer faces 5 years and $250K fine as FBI lobs foreign spy charges.
Citing a Trump memo ordering coordinated efforts to maintain America’s AI advantage, FBI Director Kash Patel celebrated Alfozan’s arrest and vowed to continue policing efforts to spy on frontier labs like OpenAI.
It’s “essential to safeguarding our nation’s economic strength and national security, and the FBI views that mission as one of our highest counterintelligence priorities,” Patel said.
OpenAI hired Alfozan in July 2025, but the record suggests that he started acting suspiciously in the past few months.
In August, Alfozan allegedly used an OpenAI productivity agent to figure out where and when sensitive meetings were held, a recently unsealed affidavit submitted by FBI special agent Lydia Liang said.
Liang is a data analyst who joined the FBI after working for various tech companies. She analyzed the recording device that OpenAI found, which she said was a Chinese-made Seeed XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense.
According to Liang, the Seeed device “had been customized to obfuscate anything stored on the device, such as potentially intercepted audio communications.” And the microSD card had “a layout consistent with a potentially encrypted file system.”…
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