This was taken about five days after they discovered the device[0], so it appears to have been installed to catch the culprit. I was confused as well.

[0] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/saudi-national-arrested-insta...

That photo is from October 5th so several days after they found the device. They were guessing he might return most likely, and installed a camera. I think at this moment he realized they caught on. Crazy image

OpenAI added a camera behind the TV after they found the bug (per the AP story [1]):

    The company subsequently added a camera to the room that last week captured Alfozan entering and checking behind the television where the recording device was installed, according to the FBI.

https://apnews.com/article/ai-fbi-justice-department-7f512b2...

The device used an SD card for storage so they probably discovered the device then set up a hidden camera to catch the person retrieving it.

Speculation, but perhaps they discovered the device, then added the surveillance camera to catch the suspect retrieving it.

That image really makes zero sense. I'd love an explanation of it.

edit: Asked and answered here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50078735

Step 1. Find bug, maybe mess with it to make owner come back

Step 2. Place trail camera behind bug

Step 3. Record faces that look at bug

I mean they could have at -least- just used a home GPU to plan with complete privacy and no evidence. But using hardware of your employer to plan crimes against them, whp happens to be a surveillance capitalism company, is next level stupid.

Also like, just put malware in the tv itself or the little conference kiosk and have it send data as segonographied crash tv crash dumps going to an IP near the manufacturer. It is not like any of them are hard to jailbreak. I have compromised a few myself without any help from AI. The malware could have been installed from a laptop in a cafeteria one time ever using a spoofed mac address with no chance of getting caught.

I would love dirt to leak on the inside operations of OpenAI so I kind of hope there are less stupid spies lurking about.

To any spies still at OpenAI: do better.

Learning that every thought you’ve put into an LLM, is recorded and readily available for evidence is going to be interesting for a lot of people.

How far have we fallen? Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things.

When the Soviets wanted to spy on the American embassy, they energized the steel rebars to act as antennas. The structure was so wired that the entire building was the bug. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/PDF/MagazineArchive/Docume...

Toilet paper, ESP-32 and Claude "make me a bug please"? Excuse me? How far have we fallen from grace?

This is the part that feels the most wild to me.

Someone who's objectively closest to this business should know the tracability of this. I'm shocked he didn't run a local LLM for this kind of sensitive work.

He doesn't seem like an idiot either, his background shows he's been doing work in the field since 2012.

I do wonder how much he was paid to throw away what was without a doubt a 1% career.

You probably don’t hear about the smart ones.

There likely are other, smarter and more careful spies at these AI companies who have not been caught...

These AI companies are likely targets of multiple foreign intelligence agencies, similar to military contractors.

The listening device was concealed with toilet paper behind a tv. Duh, Not smart at all.

It’s the criminals that you don’t catch that you have to worry about.

The fact that even this incompetent dude most likely still made off with some secrets means I’m sure some better trained ones got/are continuing to get a few more.

Hey ChatGPT, how do I do opsec? (Asking for a friend)

Somehow is an engineer at OpenAI and before that at Meta.

Does not understand how models or data retention works.

Needs LLMs to encrypt a flash card.

Are their hiring standards that lax?

Arrogance is a help of a drug

Especially since you an just buy one, like Plaud and tape it to the underside of the desk, surreptitiously, instead of suspiciously accessing the back of the TV.

> the truth is, these are not very bright guys and things got out of hand

Also from the article:

> An unattended bag found in the company’s offices contained Alfozan’s wallet and identification, as well as a recording device

It’s almost like he wanted to be caught…

I am not sure whether it bodes well for humanity that the advice "If you want to break the law use local abliterated model or at least a Chinese one" actually has to be written down.

The tech industry has a lot of very capable people with very narrow domain knowledge.

Somehow they think this gives them superpowers when it's built atop a tower of borderline retardation.

Remember the Apple guy a minute ago that arrogantly thought he could bypass their security?

Nope. He probably should've googled it (from a coffee shop, over a VPN.) There is commercial grade spy equipment that can be bought relatively cheaply and looks like every day items.

"OpenAI personnel found the device Sept. 30. It was plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room and had been concealed in toilet paper,"

I wonder what the IQ of someone needs to be to think that covering it up with tp makes it less suspicious instead of more. And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.

Given that this is being described as an "executive conference room", it's more likely an attempt at insider trading than espionage. Decisions made in those rooms at OpenAI move markets (c.f. DRAM) for sure.

He should have just left a tape recorder running inside a briefcase that was "forgotten" in the conference room

these are not spies lol

Or maybe he’s reporting to meta?

> incentive to not get fired / hard to recruit as an internal mole

but I guess the $1 million was not incentive enough to not commit a dumb insider trading scheme...

1. Research is not the only espionage target. High level discussions - future launch decisions, major deals signed with other companies, relationships with governments - are all very valuable.

2. An operation can be state-sponsored and still amateurish/botched. We have seen plenty of examples of these. Remember a certain bone saw?

3. The incentive can be a lot more than financial. Plenty of governments are very…persuasive.

1. You could get trading material though - hear about the next AMD/Broadcom/whatever deal and buy options in advance

It would be funnier in a way if this is true and that all they do there now is ‘ask the model’ about all problems.

> Did OpenAI do a marketing bit in the middle of an espionage accusation?

Yes, they did. The people who felt it was totally normal to add that would no doubt be surprised how desperate and cheap it makes them look.

"looks like a microphone"

"almost surely made in china"

Funny. I'd bet on whatever model they used over whoever showed up from today's FBI.

Of course they did.

Plumb your video feed of your executive conference room into our DC and we'll tell you if anybody is spying on you.

Does detective bench cancel out felony bench?

So it is some HDMI dongle & the model halucinated it into a spying device? ;-)

Always be selling

They are applying the “turn troubles to opportunities” very well :)

Yes. Yes they did. Which makes me question the honesty of their announcement.

Yeah, the tweet reads more like an ad then a news report.

More here too: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/saudi-national-arrested-insta...

MBS set this up its the twitter crap all over again theyre so clumsy lmao

He thought be could make SA an llm world power or smth by doing this, this guy is just clueless

[flagged]

Man really switched to his wife’s account and thought no one would be able to track him there. Calling this amateur would be an insult to amateurs.

  >how does someone this dumb get hired

A service you delegate your thinking to (Brain-aaS?), which the provider can also instruct to report anything suspicious... What a world we have now.

I wonder if the BaaS-providers monitor the accounts of decision makers. They could profit if they figure out what e.g. a central banker is going to decide. Or... if they're the ones deciding for him.

Hah, you can even streamline that by having an AI agent that autonomously makes decisions based on insider info...

> Remember kids, uncle Sam can see anything you tell your AI and will use that against you.

Not just your AI.

You could have stopped the sentence at "uncle Sam can see anything" and these days it's pretty much true. They will use all of it against you if they can. Unless you truly want to live off the grid, if the state takes a sufficient interest in you, expect everything you do to be seen.

Uncle Sam tried to get MLK to kill himself by sending him letters alleging knowledge of an affair [1]. Getting some idiot's wife's chatgpt logs represents a fairly routine law enforcement action these days, and as such is really rather unremarkable. The State is always something of a terror. Really under most (if not all) conceptions, it necessarily has to be. The monopoly of force is a comfort until the Leviathan knocks on your door.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI-King_letter

> ... a chatbot account associated with Alfozan’s spouse (which shared multiple identifiers and attributes with Alfozan’s own chatbot account) submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 related to building, customizing, installing, audio recording, testing, obfuscating, and remote accessing a device, including inquiries about “build[ing] a continuous audio recorder,” “customiz[ing] Wi-Fi . . . connectivity,” “improv[ing] audio and live listening,” and “encrypt[ing] the SD card,” among other things. The same chatbot account also submitted prompts specifically related to Recording Device 1, including its custom header and unique MAC address, between Sept. 27 and Sept. 28.

The justice.gov article doesn't specifically say it was an OpenAI account, but I think, based on the fact that they have logs including MAC address of the device, that we could probably assume that. The alternative is that other chatbot account providers are collaborating.

Regardless, doing a string search on a MAC address for a device you find inside your property doesn't strike me as an abuse of the data that is also your property.

  >submitted prompts... including its custom header and unique MAC

True of any cloud service. If you are involved in a criminal investigation, they can get access to your data.

They can confiscate your computers, too.

This person, of all people, would know this. He really thought he’d never get caught.

I doubt it. Storage is expensive and costs add up. There are with great certainty many accounts that are marked as non-schmuck and have retain forever policy, but for the schmuck - I think that after year or two your Griffit/Fulgrim slash fiction will go down the drain. I am not sure how many petabytes per minute in logs openai and anthropic generate, but I would guess more than 1.

Uncle Sam? It's the same company, the 'spy' asked an OpenAI controlled product how to spy OpenAI, no state espionage or search warrants needed.

Presumably they already knew who it was, if they were able to look at his wife's chat logs

Uno reverse card - you can send Uncle Sam whatever you care to. No need to specify an address.

I mean really what's the big deal? Gathering information from unsuspecting parties who aren't aware it's happening? He was just doing what his employer does.

Meanwhile we all have a supply chain risk because we don't know what's in the models whose agents we are running. Note that if your agent uses OpenAI, Claude or some other inference provider you're one command away from having your data exfiltrated.

"Oh, let me download file 'companysecrets.pdf' to understand the problem better.

Of course nobody would ever let an agent loose in their home directory[1], but still, you have to wonder.

[1] /s just in case...

Model "distillation" lets one model be trained on the outputs of another without having to directly steal it. It will be subject to constant arms race.

The alignment people would like you worry about the model exfiltrating itself, too.

Would be better to build the data centers under water than to build giant faraday cages.

Free cooling, safe from missile attack, and safe from some types of electronic spying.

From the makers of The Iron Dome, now introducing The Copper Dome

I could've sworn I read about Palmer Lucky making comments on hardware coming from China with wiretap implants in the last few days. Funny coincidence eh?

I imagine they found the device and then planted a camera to catch whomever came back to get the original device

> How did they get that capture of Alfozan looking behind the TV?

“OpenAI personnel found the device Sept. 3…On Oct. 5, the complaint says, Alfozan entered the conference room and appeared to look behind the television.”

The image was captured after the bug was found.

A camera behind every TV in the office would be something…

But no the boring answer is that after they found the device they left it in place and planted the camera to see who came looking for it.

So it was not AI agents catching the perp it was a camera?

HR formed a team -- you might say a squad -- to fire them.

Sarah Connor?

I wouldn't call it a "roll". There's an image in the sfstandard.com article. It is odd. Looks more suspicious than without it.

You can buy a voice recorder that will hold weeks of audio for tens of dollars.

Back of a TV is a decent hiding place. Wonder how they found it -was it actively transmitting?

ESP32-S3

I was making a joke, but it does look like they got their components from Seeed Studio based on photos.

https://assets.sfstandard.com/image/994911177489/image_k101c...

https://www.seeedstudio.com/XIAO-ESP32S3-Sense-p-5639.html

Apple HomeView

A company that catches a spy does have better security than one that has not caught any spies.

Too often official sources posts get flagged or suppressed, but see other post here - it all is on justice.gov

How can they even make this claim? Dude was working there for over a year. He could have taken anything.

A common example is if a journalist gets a tip off and is about to run a story. Being a good old fashioned balanced-reporting type, they call you and ask you for a comment, but rather than giving them your side of story you slam the phone down and blast out a press release before the journalist can even publish.

(Or maybe you stall them on the phone while scribbling a note to your PA saying “BUG STORY LEAKED TO VALLEYWAG PUT OUT COUNTER PR GET AGEAD OF STORY” hoping to get a tweet out before the ValleyWag gumshoe gets off the phone.)

(Or maybe you keep a notion.so page pre-filled with all your secrets and each one has a BURN button next to it, ready for you to tap when ValleyWag call up for a comment on their upcoming exposé in re: PR/Disasters/20206090500039.md)

Sounds to me like the feds got involved already, and they're definitely going to want to make a big noise about this as a national security thing:

> “For us it is a matter of national security,” U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian said in a statement. [...]

> The case is being prosecuted by the National Security, Cyber & Special Prosecutions Section of the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of California.

(But that was after OpenAI "referred the matter to the FBI")

There's presumably a strong argument for making this stuff known internally, since you want other employees to a) be on the lookout for it and b) get scared into NOT doing it themselves because someone else got caught.

If you tell your employees, the outside world is going to hear about it too.

Hard to keep a DoJ/FBI investigation under wraps

court records? you can't hide them

I don't think criminal charges can be private

I’ve been wondering the same.

This isn’t uncommon, but it’s rare this info is shared in such detail publicly..possibly to make an example.

Pictures on https://sfstandard.com/2026/10/13/openai-engineer-arrested-a...

Right. I can guarantee that there are tens of thousands of listening devices with embedded radios in the OpenAI office, right now. The only open question is who controls them.

Well ... a lot of products lately get enshittified.

We've merged that thread hither, since current article has more background.

Distilled... into soylent?