Judge orders ex-OpenAI engineer Alfozan held until trial

Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse on October 19 ordered Abdulrahman Alfozan held until trial. Alfozan is the former OpenAI engineer accused of bugging a company conference room, and the judge sided with prosecutors who argued that if released he would leave for Saudi Arabia, Business Insider reported.

The government laid out its case in a detention memo from the US Attorney’s Office, filed a day before the hearing by US attorney Craig Missakian. It includes details from the FBI’s search of Alfozan’s house that had not been reported before: what agents found on his iPhone, what he allegedly asked OpenAI’s internal tools, and who paid for his family’s one-way tickets.

What was on the iPhone

Photos on the phone showed “at least one additional concealed recording device,” along with what appear to be input/output panels on televisions and other electronics in OpenAI buildings, “including another conference room where sensitive meetings frequently occurred,” the memo says. At his home, agents found recording devices similar to the ones planted at OpenAI.

WhatsApp logs on the phone run from 2025 up to October 5 and show a member of the Saudi royal family who appeared to be recruiting him. One message urged that “Saudi needs you more then [sic] the US!” Alfozan replied “100.” Prosecutors have said the same person repeatedly tried to bring him into an AI venture being launched in Saudi Arabia, and that Alfozan said he wouldn’t leave OpenAI until his stock vested, ABC News reported. That stock was a $2.2 million new-hire grant of profit participation units, on top of a $325,000 base salary, when OpenAI hired him around July 2025.

On October 4 he opened a folder called “Saudi Gov Docs.” The government has not made its contents public, but it did describe what followed: a request to OpenAI’s productivity agent.

who from OpenAI could be suitable to attend a high level informal meeting with ministers in Saudi Arabia? List 10 people and why each. Ideally high levels.

How the bug was set up

The device OpenAI found had been in the room for “at least multiple days,” the memo says, and was there while OpenAI executives met US government officials in that room. Prosecutors say Alfozan hid it in toilet paper and plugged it into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room he wasn’t authorized to enter. Security cameras recorded him going in and checking behind the TV, and the device was found on September 30. On October 5, security staff found an unattended bag in another room holding his wallet, his ID and a second, similar recorder.

According to the government, he planned it using OpenAI’s own products. He allegedly asked the company’s productivity agent which conference rooms would be best to exploit. Then, from his wife’s personal ChatGPT account, he researched how to modify the recorders so they would start recording when they detected speech and could be controlled remotely. The complaint quotes the prompts themselves. His wife told agents she had seen her ChatGPT account open on his laptop. OpenAI has said it found no indication that he accessed or exfiltrated model weights, source code or customer data, Firstpost reported.

Who paid for the tickets?

Alfozan, a Saudi national and US permanent resident, came to the US in 2009 and holds technical degrees from MIT and UC Berkeley. OpenAI was preparing his parental leave, and he planned to use the two months of paid time off to help his wife, whose student visa had expired, move back to Saudi Arabia with their baby. The one-way ticket to Riyadh for all three was “paid for by the Saudi government,” the memo says. After his arrest, his wife and son booked an earlier flight and left without him. This time, prosecutors say, “a member of the Saudi military booked and paid for yet another one-way ticket for the defendant’s wife and son, this one business class to Doha, Qatar.”

He also has at least two bank accounts in Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabia has no extradition treaty with the US. The government pointed to the case of former Twitter employees charged with spying for Riyadh. Charges against one of them, Ali Alzabarah, are still pending, partly because “a Saudi foreign official” helped “coordinate a next-day flight to Saudi Arabia” after Twitter confronted him. Agents took Alfozan’s Saudi passport when they arrested him, but the memo argues that does not settle it:

there is nothing to stop the defendant, if he is released, from obtaining any necessary travel documents and fleeing the United States—with or without the help of a foreign government that has previously assisted its citizens depart the United States under similar circumstances

His lawyers told the court the family bought the one-way tickets more than two weeks before the alleged installation, for a roughly two-month paternity leave. They noted he has been a permanent resident since 2020 and has a naturalization interview next month, and they proposed home confinement with GPS monitoring and surrender of his passport. Lawyer William Pernik said Alfozan would put up “almost the entirety” of his assets, about $1 million in a US investment account, as bond, the Orange County Register reported. Tse asked whether Saudi Arabia’s government would reimburse him if he fled and forfeited it.

For all the Saudi material in the memo, the only charge so far is illegally recording OpenAI’s meetings, which carries a maximum of five years. Prosecutors say they expect they may bring more serious charges as the evidence builds. They also allow that he may have acted alone, and argue that it makes no difference: “Whether the defendant wanted to record OpenAI meetings to enrich himself by enhancing his own business prospects, or to provide aid [to] a foreign government, or both, his conduct is criminal.”

“He faces prison time in the United States,” the memo says. “His wife and son are now in Saudi Arabia and have no plans to return. He has the resources to flee.”