The OpenAI engineer who was fired after being charged this week with bugging a conference room at the AI giant and was nabbed by the FBI only three days before his one-way flight to Saudi Arabia was set to take off, according to reports.
Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35 year-old Saudi national, said he helped advise Saudi Arabia government agencies on technology and gushed in a recent podcast interview about meeting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, then the deputy crown prince, during the prince’s 2016 visit to Silicon Valley.
Alfozan said he had been looking for guidance on whether to return to his homeland. In response, the prince advised young Saudis in Silicon Valley to hone their skills at premier tech companies before bringing that expertise home, Alfozan said in an Arabic podcast interview last month.
“You learn from the source and then, God willing, bring that experience and knowledge back to the homeland,” Alfozan said.
Alfozan – who had also worked at Meta and an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup – was listed as a venture partner at RAED Ventures in Riyadh alongside Prince Khalid bin Bader Al Saud, a member of the Saudi royal family.
The revelations from the podcast come this week as OpenAI discovered a “surreptitious audio recording device” stuffed into a USB port on the back of a TV in a conference room — wrapped in toilet paper in an attempt to conceal the device, according to a complaint filed by federal prosecutors.
The alleged espionage highlights the cutthroat global race by governments to develop advanced AI. OpenAI has been competing with other leading AI labs including Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI along with numerous Chinese companies and the US government has said developing the most elite AI tools is a national security imperative.
“This arrest highlights our relentless efforts in partnership with the FBI to identify and prosecute those who seek to steal our technology,” said US Attorney for the Northern District of California Craig Missakian. “For us, it is a matter of national security.”
William Pernik, a lawyer representing Alfozan, said his client was charged with violating a federal recording statute, “not stealing trade secrets or working as a foreign agent,” and asked for “everyone to withhold judgment until full facts become known.”
Alfozan “came to this country years ago as a young person with a dream,” Pernik said. “He spent years studying, working and contributing to an American technological sector that leads the world, a sector built in large part by immigrants like him.”
A photo in the court document shows an oddly placed object on the back of a TV in an OpenAI conference room. Another photo shows the alleged device with the branding of Seeed Studio, a company that appears to offer AI recording products.
Meetings in that conference room apparently involved high-level discussions of the company’s confidential plans, such as proprietary research, OpenAI’s technical capabilities, its government relationships and more.
The Sam Altman-led company traced the device to Alfozan. Footage showed Alfozan appearing near the conference room multiple times, even though he had no authority to access the room or participate in those meetings, the Department of Justice said in its complaint.
Alfozan also used chatbots to plot the alleged recording efforts, asking about OpenAI’s building addresses, meeting room capacities and calendars, federal prosecutors allege.
He even requested information about the locations of “leadership and exec,” per the complaint.
Another chatbot account associated with his wife allegedly included queries on ways to install and hide audio recording devices.
On Oct. 5, a photo allegedly captured Alfozan entering the conference room to get a sneak peek at the recording device. Around that same time, OpenAI security workers found a similar recording device in Alfozan’s unattended bag, the DOJ said.
OpenAI fired Alfozan earlier this week after having worked for the San Francisco-based AI company since July 2025. Alfozan studied computer science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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