Prosecutors allege Saudi support for ex-OpenAI engineer

US prosecutors want Abdulrahman Alfozan, the former OpenAI engineer charged over a recorder hidden in a company meeting room, held in custody until trial. Their argument is that he has “considerable support” from the Saudi government. They make the case in a detention filing posted on CourtListener ahead of his October 19 appearance in federal court in San Francisco.

According to the filing, the 35-year-old Saudi national was in “frequent communication... with a member of the Saudi royal family.” Its most concrete point is a plane ticket. On October 10, the day after the FBI arrested Alfozan, his wife and son flew from San Francisco to Doha, Qatar, on a one-way business class ticket. Prosecutors say a Saudi military official booked and paid for it.

That flight came on top of an earlier plan. The arrest came three days before Alfozan, his wife and son were due to fly from San Francisco to Riyadh on a one-way itinerary. When FBI agents interviewed his wife after the arrest, she told them “her US visa was expiring” and that she and her son were “permanently moving back to Saudi Arabia,” the filing says. It adds that her husband intended to do the same.

“Ultimately, the defendant has little incentive to remain in the United States to see this case through,” prosecutors wrote. If convicted, Alfozan faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The filing also sets out why prosecutors think the case goes beyond corporate security. During the days the device is believed to have been in the room, OpenAI executives met government officials there. On that basis, prosecutors say his alleged conduct could pose “a danger to the national security of the United States.”

The device itself is described in the earlier Justice Department complaint. OpenAI staff found it on September 30, plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room in San Francisco and covered with toilet paper. It had been installed on or about September 28, and its contents were encrypted. Alfozan had no authority to enter that room, where meetings often covered proprietary research, product plans and business-development deals.

After the discovery, OpenAI put a camera in the room. On October 5 it filmed Alfozan walking in and looking behind the television. That same day, security staff opened a bag he had left unattended and found his wallet, his ID and a second recording device similar to the planted one. The complaint also says he used a productivity tool to look up meeting rooms, their capacities, calendars, and where “leadership and exec” and external partner meetings took place. Between September 24 and September 30, a chatbot account linked to his spouse sent prompts about building, testing, obfuscating and remotely accessing a continuous audio recorder. Prosecutors say that account shared several identifiers with Alfozan’s own. He was arrested on October 9, and OpenAI ended his contract.

OpenAI spokesperson Nate Evans confirmed to TechCrunch that Alfozan worked on the product team. He had been an engineer there since July 2025. The company told the outlet the recorder had “advanced encryption, audio monitoring capabilities, and a mechanism for transferring data designed to evade monitoring.” OpenAI has also said it has “no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data.”

Separately, CNBC found Alfozan listed as a partner at Raed Ventures, a Riyadh-based venture firm focused on the Middle East and North Africa. Raed announced on February 6, 2025, that Prince Khalid Bin Bader Al Saud had joined as a venture partner, and announced Alfozan in the same role two days later. CNBC says his earlier listed jobs were at Meta, Microsoft and SAP. The detention filing does not name the royal family member it mentions.

The FBI investigation is ongoing. Alfozan’s lawyer, William Pernik, said his client is presumed innocent, CBS News reported. He warned against “jumping to conclusions at this very early stage of the case when very little information is known” and against trying to “politicize” the prosecution on grounds such as nationality.