> 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.
There was a mom in Utah who killed her husband poisoning him with a moscow mule spiked with fentanyl who googled "luxury prisons for the rich" as well as "how long does life insrance companies takento.pay" "can you delete everythjng on an old icloud account" "can deleted text messages be retrieved" "what information can be cbtained from a cellphone" "how to turn find my iphone off" "can cops force you to do a lie detector test," "when does FBI get involved in a case," "what is considered a lethal.dose of fentanyl" and "what are you allowed inside utah jails."
She took out $2 million in life insurance on him and was having an affair with their handyman and they were having disputes about $$.
Also makes it important to not let other people use your LLM account... Could have more far-reaching consequences than having to make good on the offer to buy doughnuts for the office^
^being the classic message that gets sent from the account of someone who didn't lock their computer when they walked away from their desk.
A good chunk of what keeps openai and similar companies afloat is subpar people who are willing if not eager to do crappy stuff to other people. A lot of the world works this way actually.
Before AI tools like Plaud.AI, this wasnt near possible because of work/time, and no person usually do not remember exactly who said what 6 month before,unless there is some email conversation.
With Plaud, you can check unlimited backwards who said what in which meeting and what was wanted to achieve - very interesting actually to find things in there 6m later, while people said they will do it at ends of month and youself just forgot it already - and these systems allow you to chase exactly these discrepancies.
Even my non tech elderly parents know that. The fact that they used LLMs to figure out how to best bug the executives really shows how poor their judgement is.
Seems like they select for people as dependent on their product as their customers. Maybe it helps them more to have true-believers rather than intelligent people.
Just to be clear, the difficult choice is not whether to use OpenAi/Anthropic/Grok/... versus a local LLM.
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.
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.
Prepare to have that dug up 20 years in the future during some court proceedings.
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.
In the 80s one of my high school teachers said her husband was an engineer who worked on surveillance technology and described how windows could be used as recording devices. People's voices inside caused the window to have minute vibrations, which could be measured by a laser pointing at the window's exterior and reflected back and then turned into audio output. Essentially, turning a window into a microphone diaphragm. It blew my mind.
I just looked it up, the technique was apparently invented by a Soviet engineer 40 years prior - Leon Theremin, who is also known for the musical wand heard on Led Zeppelin II and various 1960s horror movie soundtracks.
Vaguely similar, since electrical wires emit EM fields that are disturbed by human bodies, you can use a special camera to see who's in a building based on those disturbances. I'm not sure how high-fidelity or easy to spoil it is, but this was real technology at least 15 years ago.
> Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things
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.
Umm, excuse me, according to the President of the United States, he wasn't a very good guy and a lot of people really didn't like him, so you should really just let that whole incident go
"You're mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial," Trump said, referring to Khashoggi. "A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen, but he knew nothing about it. And would you leave it at that? You don't have to embarrass our guest by asking a question."
Surely your conclusion should be that this was not the work of a spy - not a state sponsored one anyway. It's much more logical to conclude that he was working as a whistleblower or under some other personal agenda.
That's what you get when you make a dumb prompt and accept the first result LLM gives you. You have to push it to think out of the box, get into the realm of insane but plausible projects :).
Someone who's objectively closest to this business should know the tracability of this. I'm shocked he didn't run a local LLM for this kind of sensitive work.
He doesn't seem like an idiot either, his background shows he's been doing work in the field since 2012.
I do wonder how much he was paid to throw away what was without a doubt a 1% career.
I'll counter punching down on frontend engineers by positing that he was responsible for sandboxing their training infrastructure. Since clearly they don't know how to lock down an environment either without using llms
It’s the criminals that you don’t catch that you have to worry about.
The fact that even this incompetent dude most likely still made off with some secrets means I’m sure some better trained ones got/are continuing to get a few more.
They could have just taped it to the inside bottom of a full tissue box, and as long as they got it before the tissues were mostly empty I bet it would go undetected. Put a hand sanitizer next to it for extra camo.
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.
"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,"
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.
The bar @ OAI is surprisingly low (watch a few minutes of their video presentations) - I've concluded it has something to do w how their recruiters define 'AI Native' (who assign their own meaning to meaninglessness of it), resulting in higher aggregate brain atrophy (hard to ignore once you notice it)
should have enclosed it in a shell to look like a crappy USB A to thunderbolt adapter that some exec bought at an airport kiosk and left behind in the tv
> And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.
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 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.
I mean they could have at -least- just used a home GPU to plan with complete privacy and no evidence. But using hardware of your employer to plan crimes against them, whp happens to be a surveillance capitalism company, is next level stupid.
Also like, just put malware in the tv itself or the little conference kiosk and have it send data as segonographied crash tv crash dumps going to an IP near the manufacturer. It is not like any of them are hard to jailbreak. I have compromised a few myself without any help from AI. The malware could have been installed from a laptop in a cafeteria one time ever using a spoofed mac address with no chance of getting caught.
In red teams at a past org we would go as far as installing malicious firmware inside peoples keyboards.
I would love dirt to leak on the inside operations of OpenAI so I kind of hope there are less stupid spies lurking about.
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.
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.
Nope. He probably should've googled it (from a coffee shop, over a VPN.) There is commercial grade spy equipment that can be bought relatively cheaply and looks like every day items.
I am a bit confused by Figure 3. Do they really have a surveillance camera angled just right to capture a photo of someone between the monitor and the wall that supports it?
OpenAI added a camera behind the TV after they found the bug (per the AP story [1]):
The company subsequently added a camera to the room that last week captured Alfozan entering and checking behind the television where the recording device was installed, according to the FBI.
That photo is from October 5th so several days after they found the device. They were guessing he might return most likely, and installed a camera. I think at this moment he realized they caught on. Crazy image
A good friend of mine manages installs of AV equipment. He installs some neat equipment. Some of it is cool tech stuff HN would like. He says a lot of conference rooms have video and audio recording devices.
> The man arrested for planting a secret recording device at OpenAI's headquarters is a Venture Partner of a VC firm alongside the son of a senior Saudi intelligence official:
There are a few people like this. They constantly eavesdrop on everyone and everything around them (via tools).
I knew a guy who, in the 1990's, had "gator spying tool" installed on his work PC, and then would casually invite people to use his PC (not everyone had a work PC back then), and then snag their passwords. And then spy on their private email. Was dumb enough to tell me, and then tried to get me to use his PC. No thank you bruh.
> "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."
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.
1. You're not going to get much actionable research material on proprietary technologies by audio bugging what's said in an executive conference room. That's what you'd do if you were after economic or deal negotiation info.
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.
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 at least $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.
> 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 at least $1M after OAI's IPO - and maybe much more.
They may have been thinking they could make >$5-10M on trading options on insider knowledge on upcoming OpenAI deals (or ending thereoff)
> That's a lot of incentive to not get fired and probably makes you pretty hard to recruit as an internal mole for cash.
1. Research is not the only espionage target. Executive level discussions – future launch decisions, major deals signed with other companies, relationships with governments, blackmail material – are all very valuable.
2. An operation can be state-sponsored and still amateurish/botched. We have seen plenty of examples of these. Remember a certain bone saw?
3. The incentive can be a lot more than financial. Plenty of governments are very…persuasive.
Why is the word "poached" though, like it's illegal or those people "rightfully belongs" to OpenAI but now Facebook "stole" them somehow? Feels like something Steve Jobs would coin just to make it sound worse than it is. People switch jobs, this is OK.
Considering the engineer in question, after a multi-year career at Meta and now OpenAI, needed the model to encrypt an SD card, seems to not be far from the truth...
I wonder how much state-sponsored corporate espionage there is. I'm not an OpenAI employee, but my mental model of tech startups involves a lot of openness/trust (it's one of the reasons people work there).
I have to imagine many techniques/plans/figures are open secrets to nation states.
His Github is crazy, he pushed changed to official public OpenAI repos and in October all his commits are to private repos. I would check that first as an investigator.
why can AI counter "sophisticated security threats" if the device was found with a bug sweep? because they gave chatgpt a image of the encrypted device and it "assessed changes in the underlying data"?
Thank god security at a company which...checks notes...has remote code execution on every developers laptop and access to practically unlimited secrets uploaded by its agents...is top notch.
He may be a spy, but he’s not a competent spy. Absence of evidence (of spies) is not evidence of absence (of spies). He just set the bar so low that even OpenAI noticed his activities.
lol… I hope I get to see the TV Show depicting the current era inside AI labs. It’ll give both The Sopranos and The Wire a run for their money for sure.
Concealed in toilet paper? We are definitely not dealing with James Bond, that is a pretty hilariously backwards way of going about things. Did he really think that would be less suspicious looking than the dongle itself?
My brain is cooked on news. I read executive conference room and my brain immediately jumped to "they bugged the white house" (executive being the trigger word I guess). And I accepted it as normal so much that I checked the google model news discussion first before reading this article. I dont have a point to this beyond I need to do something about news frying my brain, that too of a country I don't even live in.
> We take protecting our technology, data, and people seriously, and as a matter of national importance.
What is there to protect? The GPT architecture is publicly known at this point, Anthropic arguably has superior models, there are dozens of other providers who are neck and neck...
State sponsored intelligence agencies can point a camera at an exterior window and reconstruct dialogue from the vibrations. This was a loose, hand-soldered ESP32. Settle down.
These are not very smart spies:
> 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.
“I did not kill my wife!”
“Cool so why did you search for how to hide a dead body the same day she went missing?”
There was a mom in Utah who killed her husband poisoning him with a moscow mule spiked with fentanyl who googled "luxury prisons for the rich" as well as "how long does life insrance companies takento.pay" "can you delete everythjng on an old icloud account" "can deleted text messages be retrieved" "what information can be cbtained from a cellphone" "how to turn find my iphone off" "can cops force you to do a lie detector test," "when does FBI get involved in a case," "what is considered a lethal.dose of fentanyl" and "what are you allowed inside utah jails."
She took out $2 million in life insurance on him and was having an affair with their handyman and they were having disputes about $$.
https://www.ktvu.com/news/utah-mom-kouri-richins-googled-lux...
After she killed him she authored a children's book about grief for kids.
Man I really need to stop playing modern setting TTRPGs
And lose your alibi?
Yes, what an idiot.
He should have searched "I love my wife".
Then law enforcement would know he couldn't possibly. Open and shut case, Johnson.
"I wanted to know what would potential killer would've done because I know you guys are doing fuck all to find her"
Also makes it important to not let other people use your LLM account... Could have more far-reaching consequences than having to make good on the offer to buy doughnuts for the office^
^being the classic message that gets sent from the account of someone who didn't lock their computer when they walked away from their desk.
I figured any hire at openai would know that at least
A good chunk of what keeps openai and similar companies afloat is subpar people who are willing if not eager to do crappy stuff to other people. A lot of the world works this way actually.
Word.
Company is another.
It starts far before that:
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.
Isn't this standard C level behaviour?
Before AI tools like Plaud.AI, this wasnt near possible because of work/time, and no person usually do not remember exactly who said what 6 month before,unless there is some email conversation.
With Plaud, you can check unlimited backwards who said what in which meeting and what was wanted to achieve - very interesting actually to find things in there 6m later, while people said they will do it at ends of month and youself just forgot it already - and these systems allow you to chase exactly these discrepancies.
At this points its an IQ test. Stupid people still google exactly what heinous stuff they plan to do and think thats gonna fly.
Even my non tech elderly parents know that. The fact that they used LLMs to figure out how to best bug the executives really shows how poor their judgement is.
Same goes for anything you've put into social media, chat apps, or email for at least the last decade or two.
And anything you put in your phone for the last decade as well
I think people have some awareness, but like search history they believe deleting will resolve that (it won't).
Yeah if you're logged in to a Google account when you search, clearing your local browser history does nothing.
To be honest, from OpenAI engineer I would expect better.
Seems like they select for people as dependent on their product as their customers. Maybe it helps them more to have true-believers rather than intelligent people.
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.
It’s like thinking about edge cases in programming…
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.
I gots to know...
Just to be clear, the difficult choice is not whether to use OpenAi/Anthropic/Grok/... versus a local LLM.
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.
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.
Prepare to have that dug up 20 years in the future during some court proceedings.
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.
How far have we fallen? Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things.
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. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/PDF/MagazineArchive/Docume...
Toilet paper, ESP-32 and Claude "make me a bug please"? Excuse me? How far have we fallen from grace?
In the 80s one of my high school teachers said her husband was an engineer who worked on surveillance technology and described how windows could be used as recording devices. People's voices inside caused the window to have minute vibrations, which could be measured by a laser pointing at the window's exterior and reflected back and then turned into audio output. Essentially, turning a window into a microphone diaphragm. It blew my mind.
I just looked it up, the technique was apparently invented by a Soviet engineer 40 years prior - Leon Theremin, who is also known for the musical wand heard on Led Zeppelin II and various 1960s horror movie soundtracks.
https://people.ece.uw.edu/nikitin_pavel/papers/RFID-vox_2013...
Vaguely similar, since electrical wires emit EM fields that are disturbed by human bodies, you can use a special camera to see who's in a building based on those disturbances. I'm not sure how high-fidelity or easy to spoil it is, but this was real technology at least 15 years ago.
I recall a HN thread (or maybe it was a github project) about using a similar tactic to figure out keypresses in offices. Very interesting stuff.
> Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things
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.
I mean, why bother? Nobody will do anything and the US president can be bribed or flattered to say whatever you want later.
Umm, excuse me, according to the President of the United States, he wasn't a very good guy and a lot of people really didn't like him, so you should really just let that whole incident go
"You're mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial," Trump said, referring to Khashoggi. "A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen, but he knew nothing about it. And would you leave it at that? You don't have to embarrass our guest by asking a question."
https://www.npr.org/2025/11/18/nx-s1-5612504/trump-saudi-ara...
Surely this is because good spies don’t make the news.
Unless everyone's pagers start exploding
Counterpoint: Operation Spiderweb
Surely your conclusion should be that this was not the work of a spy - not a state sponsored one anyway. It's much more logical to conclude that he was working as a whistleblower or under some other personal agenda.
LLMs have democratized espionage!
Are we going to go with slopspionage, or espislop?
spycraft -> spyslop
espionage -> espislop
007 -> 006.999997
That's what you get when you make a dumb prompt and accept the first result LLM gives you. You have to push it to think out of the box, get into the realm of insane but plausible projects :).
And not do this from your spouse's account.
You are an expert spy. How do I bug my workplace? Make no mistakes.
Counter spying has gotten sloppy and mostly digital/remote.
That lowers the entry bar for basic spying.
Not only that, they had Leon Theremin design some of their bugs! That's classy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
This is the part that feels the most wild to me.
Someone who's objectively closest to this business should know the tracability of this. I'm shocked he didn't run a local LLM for this kind of sensitive work.
He doesn't seem like an idiot either, his background shows he's been doing work in the field since 2012.
I do wonder how much he was paid to throw away what was without a doubt a 1% career.
You probably don’t hear about the smart ones.
Prisons have a lower-than-general-population-iq for a reason.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White
What portion of grand conspiracies do we think go undetected forever? Do we have any reasons for our intuitions?
Somehow is an engineer at OpenAI and before that at Meta.
Does not understand how models or data retention works.
Needs LLMs to encrypt a flash card.
Are their hiring standards that lax?
Must be a frontend dev
I'll counter punching down on frontend engineers by positing that he was responsible for sandboxing their training infrastructure. Since clearly they don't know how to lock down an environment either without using llms
It’s the criminals that you don’t catch that you have to worry about.
The fact that even this incompetent dude most likely still made off with some secrets means I’m sure some better trained ones got/are continuing to get a few more.
There likely are other, smarter and more careful spies at these AI companies who have not been caught...
These AI companies are likely targets of multiple foreign intelligence agencies, similar to military contractors.
The listening device was concealed with toilet paper behind a tv. Duh, Not smart at all.
Right?!
It could have just been a regular black usb stick an I bet nobody would have questioned it.
Instead "why is there something in toilet paper behind the TV?"
If I saw a usb stick looking thing in a conference room, chances of me giving a f: 2%
Me seeing toilet paper next to the TV in a meeting room? I’m picking it up and asking why we have toilet paper in the meeting room, 100%
They could have just taped it to the inside bottom of a full tissue box, and as long as they got it before the tissues were mostly empty I bet it would go undetected. Put a hand sanitizer next to it for extra camo.
Hey ChatGPT, how do I do opsec? (Asking for a friend)
SWIM wants to bug my company's boardroom...
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.
"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,"
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.
The bar @ OAI is surprisingly low (watch a few minutes of their video presentations) - I've concluded it has something to do w how their recruiters define 'AI Native' (who assign their own meaning to meaninglessness of it), resulting in higher aggregate brain atrophy (hard to ignore once you notice it)
Yeah he should have just stuck a post it note with the words “do not remove” and nobody would have noticed
IT would have noticed next time they had to plug something into the TV. Whether they cared enough to figure out what it was is a different story.
should have enclosed it in a shell to look like a crappy USB A to thunderbolt adapter that some exec bought at an airport kiosk and left behind in the tv
Yeah people are leaving stuff like that in conference room TVs all the time. Adapters, HDMI cables, etc.
> And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.
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.
> And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.
What, we’re supposed to vet everyone we network with at orgies now?
Further evidence the hiring process is orthogonal to competence.
I also wonder what this guy was paid by those AI labs...
If it were _used_ toilet paper, nobody would have touched it.
> the truth is, these are not very bright guys and things got out of hand
This dude or OpenAI generally?
Arrogance is a help of a drug
Also from the article:
> An unattended bag found in the company’s offices contained Alfozan’s wallet and identification, as well as a recording device
It’s almost like he wanted to be caught…
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.
I mean they could have at -least- just used a home GPU to plan with complete privacy and no evidence. But using hardware of your employer to plan crimes against them, whp happens to be a surveillance capitalism company, is next level stupid.
Also like, just put malware in the tv itself or the little conference kiosk and have it send data as segonographied crash tv crash dumps going to an IP near the manufacturer. It is not like any of them are hard to jailbreak. I have compromised a few myself without any help from AI. The malware could have been installed from a laptop in a cafeteria one time ever using a spoofed mac address with no chance of getting caught.
In red teams at a past org we would go as far as installing malicious firmware inside peoples keyboards.
I would love dirt to leak on the inside operations of OpenAI so I kind of hope there are less stupid spies lurking about.
To any spies still at OpenAI: do better.
The tech industry has a lot of very capable people with very narrow domain knowledge.
Somehow they think this gives them superpowers when it's built atop a tower of borderline retardation.
Remember the Apple guy a minute ago that arrogantly thought he could bypass their security?
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.
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.
Nope. He probably should've googled it (from a coffee shop, over a VPN.) There is commercial grade spy equipment that can be bought relatively cheaply and looks like every day items.
He should have just left a tape recorder running inside a briefcase that was "forgotten" in the conference room
Did you not read the article? He did that also!
these are not spies lol
I am a bit confused by Figure 3. Do they really have a surveillance camera angled just right to capture a photo of someone between the monitor and the wall that supports it?
Here is a direct link to Figure 3:
https://assets.sfstandard.com/image/994911177489/image_bfl33...
This was taken about five days after they discovered the device[0], so it appears to have been installed to catch the culprit. I was confused as well.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/saudi-national-arrested-insta...
OpenAI added a camera behind the TV after they found the bug (per the AP story [1]):
https://apnews.com/article/ai-fbi-justice-department-7f512b2...Why a recording device? Why not a device that streams audio to a remote server where it's recorded?
The device used an SD card for storage so they probably discovered the device then set up a hidden camera to catch the person retrieving it.
That photo is from October 5th so several days after they found the device. They were guessing he might return most likely, and installed a camera. I think at this moment he realized they caught on. Crazy image
A good friend of mine manages installs of AV equipment. He installs some neat equipment. Some of it is cool tech stuff HN would like. He says a lot of conference rooms have video and audio recording devices.
That image really makes zero sense. I'd love an explanation of it.
edit: Asked and answered here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50078735
Speculation, but perhaps they discovered the device, then added the surveillance camera to catch the suspect retrieving it.
Step 1. Find bug, maybe mess with it to make owner come back
Step 2. Place trail camera behind bug
Step 3. Record faces that look at bug
> The man arrested for planting a secret recording device at OpenAI's headquarters is a Venture Partner of a VC firm alongside the son of a senior Saudi intelligence official:
https://x.com/ScottMStedman/status/2110108735855333403?s=20
There are a few people like this. They constantly eavesdrop on everyone and everything around them (via tools).
I knew a guy who, in the 1990's, had "gator spying tool" installed on his work PC, and then would casually invite people to use his PC (not everyone had a work PC back then), and then snag their passwords. And then spy on their private email. Was dumb enough to tell me, and then tried to get me to use his PC. No thank you bruh.
> "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."
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.
1. You're not going to get much actionable research material on proprietary technologies by audio bugging what's said in an executive conference room. That's what you'd do if you were after economic or deal negotiation info.
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.
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 at least $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.
> 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 at least $1M after OAI's IPO - and maybe much more.
They may have been thinking they could make >$5-10M on trading options on insider knowledge on upcoming OpenAI deals (or ending thereoff)
> That's a lot of incentive to not get fired and probably makes you pretty hard to recruit as an internal mole for cash.
Most criminals assume they won't get caught.
1. Research is not the only espionage target. Executive level discussions – future launch decisions, major deals signed with other companies, relationships with governments, blackmail material – are all very valuable.
2. An operation can be state-sponsored and still amateurish/botched. We have seen plenty of examples of these. Remember a certain bone saw?
3. The incentive can be a lot more than financial. Plenty of governments are very…persuasive.
I'm out of the loop, what bone saw are we talking?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jamal_Khashog...
Not sure why OP would call it amateurish/botched.
I’m guessing they’re referring to jamal khashoggi
> incentive to not get fired / hard to recruit as an internal mole
but I guess the $1 million was not incentive enough to not commit a dumb insider trading scheme...
1. You could get trading material though - hear about the next AMD/Broadcom/whatever deal and buy options in advance
This guy previously worked at Meta from 2017 to 2022 on Data Infrastructure projects.
I expect Meta are running an audit right now to figure out if he was involved in espionage back then as well.
Or maybe he’s reporting to meta?
How did they get Wonder up the benchmarks so fast? Llama was a mess
They hired (poached) a bunch of the top talent from OpenAI and other places. It's really not a secret.
Why is the word "poached" though, like it's illegal or those people "rightfully belongs" to OpenAI but now Facebook "stole" them somehow? Feels like something Steve Jobs would coin just to make it sound worse than it is. People switch jobs, this is OK.
It’s been used like this since the 1850s
Perhaps dividends from the forced, company-wide panopticon RLHF.
Seems possible there is some chance Alexandr knows what he's doing.
A new team, probably focused on better data.
> We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from [...]
I'll be the first one to admit, that got a hearty laugh out of me. Never miss an opportunity to market your models I guess.
It would be funnier in a way if this is true and that all they do there now is ‘ask the model’ about all problems.
Considering the engineer in question, after a multi-year career at Meta and now OpenAI, needed the model to encrypt an SD card, seems to not be far from the truth...
I wonder how much state-sponsored corporate espionage there is. I'm not an OpenAI employee, but my mental model of tech startups involves a lot of openness/trust (it's one of the reasons people work there).
I have to imagine many techniques/plans/figures are open secrets to nation states.
Chances are he'll escape back home before the trial:
https://www.propublica.org/article/saudi-fugitives-accused-o...
Always fun to checkout the social media of the accused,
https://x.com/alfozan
Not too much there. A link to Tim Urban's "Your Life in Weeks" infographic. Life is short, dream big.
His LinkedIn is still up and suggesting he still works at OAI... which I'm not so sure of
His Github is crazy, he pushed changed to official public OpenAI repos and in October all his commits are to private repos. I would check that first as an investigator.
https://github.com/alfozan
why can AI counter "sophisticated security threats" if the device was found with a bug sweep? because they gave chatgpt a image of the encrypted device and it "assessed changes in the underlying data"?
He was trying to catch them during those meetings where the executives recite the full model weights
You would think he had the skills, resources and intelligence to ask his incriminating questions to a locally hosted model.
classic, glad we continue to support the saudi government...
Can anyone speculate why it was wrapped in a toilet paper roll?
That seems odd, especially since it would dampen the sound recording
I wouldn't call it a "roll". There's an image in the sfstandard.com article. It is odd. Looks more suspicious than without it.
The text says "concealed in toilet paper" and the pic looks like a mostly empty toilet roll to me.
But maybe he didn't put a case on the device? I think if he'd 3D printed something or wrapped it in black tape it would have been a lot less visible.
I wonder if it was found when someone was trying to plug a cable into the TV?
Thank god security at a company which...checks notes...has remote code execution on every developers laptop and access to practically unlimited secrets uploaded by its agents...is top notch.
A company that catches a spy does have better security than one that has not caught any spies.
He may be a spy, but he’s not a competent spy. Absence of evidence (of spies) is not evidence of absence (of spies). He just set the bar so low that even OpenAI noticed his activities.
I would like to see the chatbot history.
ChatGPT: wait I'm considering if an inconspicuous piece of toilet paper should be wrapped about the device
lol… I hope I get to see the TV Show depicting the current era inside AI labs. It’ll give both The Sopranos and The Wire a run for their money for sure.
Sounds like fair use to me! Information wants to be free, remember?
Smart guy does stupid things, but why? I mean why did he, as an engineer perhaps earning north to 300k, do such a sloppy job?
Or maybe OpenAI is hiring the wrong guy? Maybe they should hire me instead?
Of all the mistakes he made, you'd think at the most minimum he would have thought to use Claude instead of ChatGTP
Looking at the device pic in here https://sfstandard.com/2026/10/13/openai-engineer-arrested-a...
It looks like it’s the (SeeedStudio XIAO ESP32S3 Sense w/ WiFi, BLE, OV2640, Mic) https://ca.robotshop.com/products/seeedstudio-xiao-esp32s3-s...
Which is just an esp32s3 based device. I assume the word “sophisticated” in openAI report is just copy paste from device description.
Should have used a local model...
Using your wife's chatbot account and covering a device in toilet paper is not smart when spying a company.
Speaking of surreptitiously installed bugs, remember to opt out of training in your Codex.
> 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
...uh what
Concealed in toilet paper? We are definitely not dealing with James Bond, that is a pretty hilariously backwards way of going about things. Did he really think that would be less suspicious looking than the dongle itself?
seeedstudio getting some impressive pr here for those xiao boards.
My brain is cooked on news. I read executive conference room and my brain immediately jumped to "they bugged the white house" (executive being the trigger word I guess). And I accepted it as normal so much that I checked the google model news discussion first before reading this article. I dont have a point to this beyond I need to do something about news frying my brain, that too of a country I don't even live in.
seems rare why would you throw your life away when you already are in the top one percent in America??
MBS using that sweet graykey behavior to exfiltrate what they can
>OpenAI said it has no indication that Alfozan improperly accessed or took model weights, source code, or customer data
Sounds like we know where their priorities lie, anyway.
How can they even make this claim? Dude was working there for over a year. He could have taken anything.
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50077703
We've merged that thread hither, since current article has more background.
> We take protecting our technology, data, and people seriously, and as a matter of national importance.
What is there to protect? The GPT architecture is publicly known at this point, Anthropic arguably has superior models, there are dozens of other providers who are neck and neck...
> We discovered a sophisticated recording device
did you though
State sponsored intelligence agencies can point a camera at an exterior window and reconstruct dialogue from the vibrations. This was a loose, hand-soldered ESP32. Settle down.