Ex-OpenAI Engineer Detained in Spy Device Case as Saudi Royal Contacts Emerge
Summary: A U.S. court on Monday granted the government's request to detain Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old former OpenAI engineer accused of planting an encrypted audio recording device in an executive conference room at the company's San Francisco office. Prosecutors said in a Sunday filing that Alfozan was in frequent WhatsApp contact with a member of the Saudi Royal Family through 2025 and 2026, including four days before his October 9, 2026 arrest, and that he had a one-way ticket to Riyadh booked for October 12.
Key Takeaway: Prosecutors argue Alfozan is a flight risk partly because the foreign government behind his contacts has no extradition treaty with the United States, and his wife and son had already left the country before his arrest. The device was built to capture meetings with senior OpenAI personnel, business counterparts, and government officials, and the filing states the investigation is ongoing.
Read the original at The Hacker News ↗
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