Pointing out a Trump memo purchasing coordinated initiatives to keep America’s AI advantage, FBI Director Kash Patel commemorated Alfozan’s apprehension and swore to continue policing efforts to snoop on frontier labs like OpenAI.
It’s “essential to safeguarding our country’s economic strength and nationwide protection, and the FBI views that goal as one of our greatest counterintelligence priorities,” Patel said.
Catching a charged AI spy
OpenAI employed Alfozan in July 2025, but the record recommends that he began acting suspiciously in the past few months.
In August, Alfozan supposedly made use of an OpenAI performance agent to find out where and when sensitive meetings were held, a lately unsealed sworn statement submitted by FBI unique agent Lydia Liang said.
Liang is an information expert who joined the FBI after working for various technology firms. She assessed the recording device that OpenAI found, which she stated was a Chinese-made Seeed XIAO ESP 32 -S 3 Feeling.
According to Liang, the Seeed gadget “had been personalized to obfuscate anything stored on the device, such as potentially intercepted audio interactions.” And the microSD card had “a layout consistent with a possibly encrypted data system.”
Along with reviewing Alfozan’s queries to OpenAI’s productivity agent, the FBI additionally assessed an AI chatbot account related to his spouse. Those logs revealed individual motivates referencing the Seeed gadget’s distinct MAC address, the FBI said, while researching how to constantly tape on that particular tool, established speech-triggered recording, and encrypt an SD card, to name a few questions.
“These written triggers attributable to Alfozan and/or his partner, indicate that Alfozan inserted Recording Gadget 1 right into the tv in Conference Room 1 and had an interest in structure, customizing, mounting, audio recording, testing, obfuscating, and remote accessing, to name a few points, a surreptitious sound listening and videotaping gadget,” Liang claimed.
