OpenAI engineer arrested by FBI for allegedly bugging conference room had booked one-way flight to Saudi Arabia
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 ...