The Saudi OpenAI engineer accused of hiding a microphone in a meeting room will remain in detention due to a risk of flight, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Monday, wary of the support given to him by Saudi authorities. “There is a significant risk of non-appearance,” declared Judge Alex Tse, very surprised by the proposal from the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles to pay the entire bail of this 35-year-old engineer. “It looks like a blank check, as if we were saying: we will pay what the court wants,” said the magistrate.
A graduate of the prestigious MIT and formerly of Meta, Abdulrahman Alfozan is linked to high-ranking figures in Riyadh and is “a valuable talent for the Saudi government,” he noted. What he could gain in Saudi Arabia is perhaps well worth the million dollars in bail - almost all his savings according to the defense - that he would lose by fleeing, estimated the judge, after having clearly nodded the prosecutor's argument on this point. “Once he leaves, it’s impossible to bring him back, the affair dies down,” he summarized.
Dressed in a thick orange tracksuit and flanked by two federal agents, the accused did not speak during the hour-long hearing. “He is not a tourist” but a man “a few weeks away from becoming an American,” argued his lawyer William Pernik, regularly interrupted by the judge. He denounced a story depicting without evidence his client “as some sort of foreign infiltrator.” Instead, he said, OpenAI “successfully leveraged” its ties to Saudi Arabia. Between the time the company confronted him and his arrest by the FBI, more than a week passed without his client trying to flee, he noted.
An offense punishable by five years in prison
Employed since 2025 by the creator of ChatGPT, the engineer was arrested on October 9, after the discovery of a recording device in a meeting room, reserved for management according to the prosecution, open to employees according to the defense. He is only being prosecuted for “interception of communications”, punishable by five years in prison, and not for espionage, even if the head of American intelligence and the director of the FBI have presented the case as a “national security” issue. “It’s no secret” that other charges could be brought, said prosecutor Nicholas Parker. But the prosecution does not decide on the motive: “to enrich himself by improving his own professional prospects, or to help a foreign government, or both,” she writes in her memoir. According to this document, the engineer had questioned an internal OpenAI tool about visits by Saudi ministers to the company, between July and September.
OpenAI said it had no indication of access to its models, code or customer data. “Certainly, we do not have proof that he stole anything,” admitted the judge, while emphasizing that the company had chosen to fire him without delay. Introduced in a September video as OpenAI's only Saudi employee, Abdulrahman Alfozan is described as a pillar of the Saudi Silicon Valley community in one of 54 letters of support produced by the defense, several of which signed the hearing. A part-time associate of a Saudi venture capital fund, he applied to the “2030 Leaders” program of the Misk foundation, linked to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
A member of the royal family was seeking to recruit him for an AI initiative, according to the prosecution, which specifies that he earned $385,000 per year at OpenAI and had received more than $2.2 million in company shares when he was hired. His wife, whose visa expired on October 12, and their baby born in the United States, left for the Middle East the day after his arrest, and the two countries do not have an extradition treaty. In its brief, the prosecution recalled that a Saudi Twitter engineer, accused of spying on opponents on behalf of Riyadh, had fled to Saudi Arabia in 2015. The next procedural hearing was set for November 6, the day his naturalization interview was scheduled.
