Abdulrahman Alfozan was scheduled to speak at an event at Stanford University last Friday, where he was considered a draw as a rare Saudi national working at OpenAI. Twenty minutes before the talk, organisers received a call from a friend who said he would not make it, according to a person who knows Alfozan. On Tuesday, it emerged that the 35-year-old had been arrested by the FBI after OpenAI found a cheap Chinese-made recording device wrapped in toilet paper and inserted in the back of a television in an executive conference room.
OpenAI has said it fired Alfozan after the discovery, while the US Department of Justice released an image appearing to show him peering behind the screen where the bug was hidden. Alfozan did not respond to requests for comment. His dismissal is a dramatic fall from grace for an engineer who has cited Elon Musk as a role model and was previously lauded in local media as a tech pioneer who mixed with top Saudi officials. Such connections have fuelled longstanding concerns in Silicon Valley that AI groups are a top target for industrial espionage by foreign nations seeking an advantage in the global AI race.
Acquaintances in the Gulf described deep shock at the arrest. He was invariably described as polite and gentle-spoken, and one contact said, "He can't harm a fly." As recently as last month, Alfozan was a constant presence between Silicon Valley and Saudi Arabia. The kingdom's Public Investment Fund is a prominent investor in US tech start-ups and had previously held talks to fund OpenAI. In September, he welcomed Saudi tech influencers to OpenAI's offices during Apple's iPhone 18 launch, and he hosted a roundtable during a visit by Saudi IT minister Abdullah al-Swaha.
His lawyer, William Pernik, said Alfozan "came to this country years ago as a young person with a dream" and that the allegations "appear wholly out of character for him." Born in Qassim and raised in Dammam in the kingdom's Eastern Province, Alfozan developed his fascination with technology during computer science classes in middle school.
Source: Financial Times Companies · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing