Accused of planting a microphone at OpenAI, a Saudi engineer arrested and charged in San Francisco

A Saudi engineer at OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has been arrested and detained, accused of hiding a "clandestine recording device" in a boardroom of the artificial intelligence company's management in San Francisco. Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, was arrested on October 9 and appeared before a federal judge on Tuesday for "interception of communications", an offense punishable by five years in prison, the US Department of Justice announced the same day.

“This serious case shows why winning the global race for super-intelligence is a national security imperative,” Jay Clayton, the director of American intelligence, just appointed to head the White House task force on AI, called the “Super Intelligence Force,” said in a statement. “US intelligence remains mobilized to protect America's cutting-edge intellectual property against foreign threats,” he added, without naming a sponsor in this affair.

OpenAI had announced a few minutes earlier the arrest of an employee it had reported to the FBI, after identifying a "sophisticated recording device", designed to evade detection and equipped with complex encryption, in a meeting room. According to the complaint, the device was discovered on September 30, plugged into a television's USB port and hidden in toilet paper. It had been installed two days earlier and its contents were encrypted. A second similar device was found in a bag that he had left on the premises, we can still read in the complaint.