An engineering employee of OpenAI has been formally charged with secretly installing a hidden recording device in the company's meeting room in an attempt to covertly record sensitive discussions about the company's artificial intelligence, or AI, technology.
The arrested employee is a 35-year-old Saudi Arabian national named Abdulrahman Alfozan, who was taken into custody after the creator of ChatGPT discovered the concealed recording device in the company's meeting room.
According to the complaint, the recording device was found on September 30, hidden inside a tissue and plugged into a USB port at the back of a television in the executives' conference room. And although that meeting room did not have security cameras at the time the object was installed, security cameras inside the company's headquarters showed that this employee had been near that meeting room nearly ten times the previous month, even though he had no right or duty to enter or attend meetings there.
OpenAI warned that the attempted theft of sensitive information from OpenAI by this Saudi Arabian national is a matter that deserves the highest attention, given that stealing intellectual property related to advanced artificial intelligence technology poses a serious threat to our national security.
Mr. Alfozan was arrested by the FBI on October 9, and OpenAI immediately terminated his employment contract. OpenAI confirmed that no conclusion has yet been reached indicating that this individual accessed or extracted any company data or source code, while the individual is currently in custody awaiting trial.
By: Rithy
