A Saudi engineer appears before the American judiciary on charges of spying on OpenAI

OpenAI announced that it had found a recording device in a meeting room designated for the company's senior management. The accused is a 35-year-old Saudi engineer, and today he faces charges of illegal eavesdropping on communications, according to the US Department of Justice.

The defendant was arrested on October 9, and appeared before a federal judge in San Francisco in a preliminary hearing. If convicted, he may face up to five years in prison, in addition to the possibility of a fine exceeding $250,000, followed by a three-year period of supervised release, according to the official website of the US Department of Justice.

According to the court, the existence of the device was discovered on September 30, as it was installed in the USB port of a television and hidden inside toilet paper. The contents of the device were encrypted and it is believed that it had been placed there two days before its discovery. A similar device was also found in a bag that the accused left inside the company’s headquarters, according to court documents.

The San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company said the recording device was advanced, and it had to use one of its models to understand the nature of the device and its source, according to The Guardian.

OpenAI, the company that developed the ChatGPT program, issued an order to dismiss the engineer on the day of his arrest, and immediately reported the incident to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Spying on highly confidential information

Investigators reported that the conference room where the device was found regularly hosted discussions on highly confidential topics, including research projects, product plans, business relationships, and communications with government agencies.

Although the accused does not have any permission to enter that hall, surveillance cameras showed his presence near it several times before the recording device was discovered. Court documents indicate that inquiries were made, through the account of an artificial intelligence assistant linked to his wife, about how to manufacture a recording device, and about real-time eavesdropping and encryption techniques, and OpenAI explained that it was designed in a way that made it difficult to detect.

“To date, we have no indications that this individual has unauthorized access to form transactions, code, or customer data,” a company spokesperson said.