Citing a Trump memo that ordered coordinated efforts to maintain the United States’ AI advantage, FBI Director Kash Patel welcomed Alfozan’s arrest and vowed to continue law enforcement efforts to spy on frontier labs like OpenAI.
It is “essential to safeguarding our nation’s economic strength and national security, and the FBI views that mission as one of our top counterintelligence priorities,” Patel said.
Catching an accused AI spy
OpenAI hired Alfozan in July 2025, but records suggest he began acting suspiciously in recent months.
In August, Alfozan allegedly used an OpenAI productivity agent to find out where and when sensitive meetings were taking place, according to a newly unsealed affidavit filed by FBI Special Agent Lydia Liang.
Liang is a data analyst who joined the FBI after working for several technology companies. She analyzed the recording device that OpenAI found and according to her, it was a Chinese-made Seeed XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense.
According to Liang, the Seeed device “had been customized to hide anything stored on the device, such as potentially intercepted audio communications.” And the microSD card had “a design consistent with a potentially encrypted file system.”
In addition to reviewing Alfozan’s queries to the OpenAI productivity agent, the FBI also reviewed an AI chatbot account associated with his spouse. Those logs showed user prompts that referenced the Seeed device’s unique MAC address, the FBI said, as it investigated how to continuously record on that device, set up voice-activated recording and encrypt an SD card, among other inquiries.
The records of Alfozán’s wife.
The records of Alfozán’s wife.
Credit: via Liang’s affidavit
“These written indications attributable to Alfozan and/or his spouse indicate that Alfozan inserted Recording Device 1 into the television in Conference Room 1 and was interested in building, customizing, installing, audio recording, testing, obfuscating, and remotely accessing, among other things, a surreptitious audio listening and recording device,” Liang said.
