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?

That's because in all likelihood he is not a spy. He is an agent (lol, not an AI agent) who has a handler, who is the trained specialist[1]. The agent is disposable. The handler or case officer usually but not always has diplomatic cover courtesy of a nation state.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_handling

You probably don’t hear about the smart ones.

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?

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.

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.

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.

I don’t think this guy was operating under a spy network, he was probably just trying to make bank with insider info. He is screwed royally for his dumb move and nobody will come to his rescue. He got greedy.

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

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

I bet this was an attempt to get insider info for trading, rather than espionage.

"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.

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.

If there's one thing I've learnt about criminals (and spies), it's that a large percentage of them are incredibly careless and arrogant, often bordering on idiotic.

Remember, we've seen criminals caught because of such amazing decisions as:

- Writing and publishing books and essays describing their own crimes - Adding hints into livestreams like they're trying to be the Riddler from Batman - Searching for info on how to commit crimes via Google and not even bothering to clear their browser history - Outright recording their crimes for YouTube/TikTok or livestreaming them on a site like Twitch or Kick.

The average criminal seems to be careless to the point of insanity.

That said, I guess it's also probably because the average person doesn't seem to realise they're being recorded if they use LLMs or search engines, and the average criminal or spy is no more tech savvy than that.

> 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.

Arrogance is a help of a drug

> These are not very smart spies

SV and SF are filled with people who are drastically less intelligent than they, or the people signing their paychecks, think they are.

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.

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.

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.

In red teams at a past org we would go as far as installing malicious firmware inside peoples keyboards.

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.

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

these are not spies lol

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...

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.

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.

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

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

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

A good friend of mine manages installs of AV equipment. He installs some neat equipment. Some of it is cool tech stuff HN would like. He says a lot of conference rooms have video and audio recording devices.

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

Or maybe he’s reporting to meta?

1. Research is not the only espionage target. Executive level discussions – future launch decisions, major deals signed with other companies, relationships with governments, blackmail material – 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.

> 3. They say he was an "engineer" who'd been there ~15 months. If you're an actual engineer at OAI and past the 1 year cliff, you're probably already sitting on RSUs likely to be worth at least $1M after OAI's IPO - and maybe much more.

They may have been thinking they could make >$5-10M on trading options on insider knowledge on upcoming OpenAI deals (or ending thereoff)

> That's a lot of incentive to not get fired and probably makes you pretty hard to recruit as an internal mole for cash.

Most criminals assume they won't get caught.

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

> 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.

I was interested in the latter part of the sentence:

> We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier.

How did the model narrow it down to a specific employee? What data did they use to determine this?

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

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?

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

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.

> 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

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.

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...

> ... 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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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?

His LinkedIn is still up and suggesting he still works at OAI... which I'm not so sure of

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?

Like hypothesized above, maybe the guy was under duress.

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

Sarah Connor?

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

"Commits are to private repos" why is this unusual? Very expected if OpenAI has private repos in a github org.

I love how his github history abruptly stops on the 8th. Bro won't be making any commits for a while!

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.

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

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

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

It covered up the Sekrit Listnin Duvice logo.

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...

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.

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

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

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

Distilled... into soylent?

Not even any soldering involved. The ESP32 board they used just comes with everything needed, all attached with a couple socket connectors and optionally a ribbon cable for the camera:

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

It's pretty much the least sophisticated recording device possible. A kid could assemble it and prompt an LLM for the software like they did.