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OpenAI employee arrested for allegedly using AI and toilet paper to record confidential meetings - FBI director Kash Patel jumps at the chance to say AI companies are 'essential' for national security
AI and toilet paper: the joke writes itself, doesn't it?
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An OpenAI engineer has been arrested and charged for using (or endeavoring to use) an audio recording device to spy on confidential company communications. That's according to the US Department of Justice, and while commercial espionage is nothing new, there's a certain sardonic twist to this one: it seems the accused employee did so with the help of AI. Oh, and some toilet paper.
According to FBI director Kash Patel's summary of the complaint, Saudi Arabian national Abdulrahman Alfozan "allegedly concealed a covert recording device inside his employer’s executive conference room to secretly capture sensitive communications about the company’s super intelligence technology."
In case you hadn't heard, that's what the US bigwigs are calling AI now: superintelligence. Courtesy of President Trump, of course, who said last month that the Administration will use this term in place of artificial intelligence "in any applicable setting."
The FBI director also said, "Protecting American SI innovation is essential to safeguarding our nation’s economic strength and national security, and the FBI views that mission as one of our highest counterintelligence priorities."
The complaint says that Alfozan had worked for OpenAI since July 2025 as an engineer, and at the end of last month OpenAI discovered a USB audio recording device plugged into a conference room TV. According to the Justice Department, the device, which had been installed for a couple of days before discovery, was "concealed in toilet paper."
The complaint also alleges that Alfozans' spouse's "chatbot" account (no mention of whether that's a ChatGPT account or something else) submitted prompts related to things such as "build[ing] a continuous audio recorder", "improv[ing] audio and live listening", and "encrypt[ing] the SD card." There were allegedly also prompts relating to the specific recording device that was found.
The conference room in question seems to have been an important one. The Department of Justice explains:
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