Alfozan pleads not guilty in OpenAI bugging case

Abdulrahman Alfozan, the former OpenAI engineer accused of hiding a listening device at the company’s San Francisco headquarters, pleaded not guilty in federal court on November 6, CNBC reports. The case against him is one charge for now: a grand jury indicted him on October 27 on a single count of interception of oral communications, which carries a maximum of five years in prison.

The hearing before Magistrate Judge Peter Kang was brief, and Alfozan, 35, went back to jail afterwards. He has been held without bail since his arrest in early October. Before the indictment, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing a law-enforcement official, that the FBI was looking at adding an economic espionage charge. The count the grand jury returned is interception alone.

How the case got here:

• September 28: prosecutors say Alfozan put a recording device inside a television in an executive conference room. OpenAI staff found it around September 30, plugged into a USB port on the back of the TV and wrapped in toilet paper, with its contents encrypted.
• October 9: the FBI arrested him, three days before a one-way flight to Saudi Arabia booked for him, his wife and a third relative.
• October 19: Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse ordered him held until trial, siding with prosecutors who argued he was a flight risk. Their filing cited WhatsApp messages in which a member of the Saudi royal family appeared to recruit him.

OpenAI says it used its own models to work out what the device was and who had planted it. It then referred the matter to the FBI and fired the employee. The company also said it had “no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data.”

Alfozan is also a venture partner at Raed Ventures, a Saudi venture capital firm. His bio on the firm’s site reads: “He currently serves as Engineering Lead at OpenAI, with a focus on AI Agents and the data platform.” Prince Khalid Bin Bader Al Saud, a member of the Saudi royal family, is a venture partner at the same firm.

Alfozan is due back in court on November 17.