I am a bit confused by Figure 3. Do they really have a surveillance camera angled just right to capture a photo of someone between the monitor and the wall that supports it?
> A chatbot account tied to Alfozan’s spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 about building, installing, obscuring, and remotely accessing a recording device, prosecutors said. Queries included how to “build a continuous audio recorder” and “encrypt the SD card,” prosecutors claimed. On Sept. 27 and 28, the account asked about the specific device that was later found, including its unique MAC address.
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.
OpenAI is both a company that manages a lot of money and a lot of political power, that the target was an "executive conference room" gives no indication as to whether the motives were financial or political.
What might tilt the bayesian balance in favour of political intent would be the nationality of the individual, state or religious sponsoring become hypotheses.
Honestly I think you can rule out "political" already, no? It's far easier to just bribe politicians for that kind of intelligence. My point was that they weren't stealing models, they wanted decisionmaking intel.
Just to be clear, the difficult choice is not whether to use OpenAi/Anthropic/Grok/... versus a local LLM.
The choice is whether to hang out with people with whom you can't be sure they don't have a Plaud/Pocket/.. in their literal pocket which is continuously listening.
Unfortunately the set of such people will eventually be shrinking more and more until eventually only a few tinfoil folks are left. Dystopian? Just think back w.r.t. continuous tracking by Google/Facebook/.. Unthinkable 30 years ago, total standard today. Try to count the fraction of your emails that don't actually reside on a MSFT or Google server because the other end has an account there. That fight is over. You can just as well join them.
Prepare to have that dug up 20 years in the future during some court proceedings.
Or at the border where it is already routine to ask for social media accounts (especially foreign nationals) you might someday five the border agent your login.
Even my non tech elderly parents know that. The fact that they used LLMs to figure out how to best bug the executives really shows how poor their judgement is.
"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.
should have enclosed it in a shell to look like a crappy USB A to thunderbolt adapter that some exec bought at an airport kiosk and left behind in the tv
> And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.
Remember, this is only the company responsible for potentially building and aligning AGI. No need to be setting high expectations toward their sandboxing or hiring capabilities.
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.
Recall that multiple of the Chinese LLM providers got caught sending at least some of their queries to Claude. That would be a pretty funny way to get caught in turn doing something by the US government.
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.
> Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things
Assuming this is espionage—for which I have seen zero evidence—isn’t Saudi Arabia notorious for having a fuckup of an intelligence operation? The literal hatchet job that was the Khashoggi murder comes to mind.
Umm, excuse me, according to the President of the United States, he wasn't a very good guy and a lot of people really didn't like him, so you should really just let that whole incident go
That's what you get when you make a dumb prompt and accept the first result LLM gives you. You have to push it to think out of the box, get into the realm of insane but plausible projects :).
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.
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.
> "Scott Schelble, special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Francisco field office, said the agency is committed to protecting sensitive research and proprietary technology."
While the headlines and quotes seem designed to imply sophisticated industrial espionage, potentially by a state-level actor, what's public so far isn't adding up that way.
1. You're not going to get much actionable research material on proprietary technologies by audio bugging what's said in an executive conference room. That's what you'd do if you were after economic or deal negotiation info.
2. Hard to imagine a state-level actor buying a ~$15-$35 hobbyist ESP32 board from Seeed Studio (I've ordered a couple from there for home automation myself) and then asking a public chatbot for set up instructions.
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. That's a lot of incentive to not get fired and probably makes you pretty hard to recruit as an internal mole for cash.
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.
Yes? I mean, I don’t think it’s a character flaw to not know things, but their rivalry is extremely notorious and relevant. Someone who can't keep them straight won’t be able to understand what’s going on in AI.
It could be that the reports are accurate and the device simply wasn’t as sophisticated as the statement implies. You could if you wanted use an AI model to analyze a USB camera with device name “John_Doe_1”.
Or it was a voice recorder plugged into a USB port on the back of the TV for power.
Looking at the photo of the device, it looks like an XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense with the camera removed but the camera board still installed along with its microphone. The wifi/Bluetooth antenna is installed but it also supports microSD cards.
If I was building this, I'd just set it up so I'd never have to recover it. Have the wifi AP come on for a few minutes at various times during business hours under a MAC and SSID that resembles a smartphone hotspot. Vary the time based on the current day of month week to produce pseudorandomness. Walk by that conference room at some of those times, but not every time, and use a burner to connect and download the latest recordings. Once a recording has been transfered, it's deleted and overwritten to prevent someone from establishing a timeline. If recordings sit for more than a few days, they are wiped. If you can encrypt the SD card, keep the key in RAM so there's nothing useful to recover if someone pulls it out.
You'd never have to recover the device because all data is transfered covertly. Even if security finds it, they'll likely inadvertently wipe it when it's removed.
This is a very weird take to me. They're demonstrating they're able to in-house this cybersecurity investigation, leading to the alleged perpetrator's arrest, and you think that makes them look "desperate and cheap?"
I've worked in a few places that had ultra-privileged power tools for user analysis. Would it really be a surprise to learn their security team has an MCP that queries a full text index of all user inputs. It would almost be more surprising to learn they don't have this, seems the kind of thing that would be invaluable for model research too
Considering the engineer in question, after a multi-year career at Meta and now OpenAI, needed the model to encrypt an SD card, seems to not be far from the truth...
> ... 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.
Not the smartest engineer ever, that use case perfectly align with using a Chinese model! And anyway I have no idea how he was hoping not to be caught in the case the device would be discovered.
in addition to the whole crime thing, an 'openai engineer', apparently engineering lead according to his linkedin, having to ask chatgpt to tell him how to set up a recorder or how to encrypt a sd card is something. Truly the cream of the engineering crop at those top AI labs
I used to joke that the nsa should offer a paid service for no-setup backups. You just tell them what files you've lost, and they can send you a copy for a fee.
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...
I actually am curious if they were able to volunteer the information to the government of their own volition, without a government subpoena first. I would think that could violate their own terms if done sloppily. Maybe different if an employee or maybe they had to invite the government to ask for them or something? In any case, the mechanism aside, the state would have asked anyway (say if he used another company's chatbot) so the fact that it's the "same company" is rather irrelevant. The evidence would have ended up in the state's hands one way or the other, and I would think a search warrant in this case would have been rather routine. Search warrants are infamously not a high bar to climb in most jurisdictions, as often the presiding judges tend to default to deferring to the state.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
This technique currently works because the architecture of the model is generally published and well known. But, that isn't necessarily going to be the case in the future. For example, if some new model type which is not a LLM is discovered which gets closer to AGI, just training an LLM on its outputs will not necessarily give you a competitive model
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.
Not only do they give access to their home directory, but they tell it to organize and delete unneeded files without any specifiers. A friend, who is just a power user, had Claude Co-work deleting his downloads to "help make space" and it was deleting important files that there were no other copies of.
We are going to be dealing with this kind of thing for a very long time at this rate.
Yup. And meanwhile they are taking Tailscale to task for having them do curl | sh, which of course is also a bad thing but not quite as risky as this. It makes you wonder though:
- Given all this power would they abuse it?
- Has it already been abused?
- Could they be compelled to abuse it and then to keep it quiet?
Free startup idea: Anti-espionage cameras for corporate offices. Put it behind TVs and plants etc. and it will notify the security team if it detects new objects.
> 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.”
State sponsored intelligence agencies can point a camera at an exterior window and reconstruct dialogue from the vibrations. This was a loose, hand-soldered ESP32. Settle down.
Thank god security at a company which...checks notes...has remote code execution on every developers laptop and access to practically unlimited secrets uploaded by its agents...is top notch.
Well, The Thing [0] could potentially show up on a probing sweep if you're careful.
Unless you mean, it happened to be actively transmitting during a(n investigative) sweep.
Still, raises some fun concepts. The sort of things where in this current level of technology you'd almost need to supercool a room for a sweep, blast various RF/sound/etc and look for anything that even remotely warms up, to detect (1) whether something detected something worth recording for later as well as (2) something that might be on the right wavelength/etc to trigger a send.
My brain is cooked on news. I read executive conference room and my brain immediately jumped to "they bugged the white house" (executive being the trigger word I guess). And I accepted it as normal so much that I checked the google model news discussion first before reading this article. I dont have a point to this beyond I need to do something about news frying my brain, that too of a country I don't even live in.
I have seem some articles which reference allegations from court documents / complaint, but I haven't been able to find the primary source. Do we know if that's publicly available yet?
> We take protecting our technology, data, and people seriously, and as a matter of national importance.
What is there to protect? The GPT architecture is publicly known at this point, Anthropic arguably has superior models, there are dozens of other providers who are neck and neck...
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.
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.
I am a bit confused by Figure 3. Do they really have a surveillance camera angled just right to capture a photo of someone between the monitor and the wall that supports it?
Here is a direct link to Figure 3:
https://assets.sfstandard.com/image/994911177489/image_bfl33...
That image really makes zero sense. I'd love an explanation of it.
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
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...
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.
These are not very smart spies:
> A chatbot account tied to Alfozan’s spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 about building, installing, obscuring, and remotely accessing a recording device, prosecutors said. Queries included how to “build a continuous audio recorder” and “encrypt the SD card,” prosecutors claimed. On Sept. 27 and 28, the account asked about the specific device that was later found, including its unique MAC address.
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.
OpenAI is both a company that manages a lot of money and a lot of political power, that the target was an "executive conference room" gives no indication as to whether the motives were financial or political.
What might tilt the bayesian balance in favour of political intent would be the nationality of the individual, state or religious sponsoring become hypotheses.
Honestly I think you can rule out "political" already, no? It's far easier to just bribe politicians for that kind of intelligence. My point was that they weren't stealing models, they wanted decisionmaking intel.
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.
Ever since social media, I have always gamed out what would happen if this was ever saved on the backend and used against me in the future.
It’s like thinking about edge cases in programming…
Most people are totally not like that. And it does force you into some difficult choices.
> And it does force you into some difficult choices.
I gots to know...
Just to be clear, the difficult choice is not whether to use OpenAi/Anthropic/Grok/... versus a local LLM.
The choice is whether to hang out with people with whom you can't be sure they don't have a Plaud/Pocket/.. in their literal pocket which is continuously listening.
Unfortunately the set of such people will eventually be shrinking more and more until eventually only a few tinfoil folks are left. Dystopian? Just think back w.r.t. continuous tracking by Google/Facebook/.. Unthinkable 30 years ago, total standard today. Try to count the fraction of your emails that don't actually reside on a MSFT or Google server because the other end has an account there. That fight is over. You can just as well join them.
It starts far before that:
Ive seen people going through Plaud.AI conversation to find "on day X person Y said Z to person W", just to get some amunition against them.
Isn't this standard C level behaviour?
I think people have some awareness, but like search history they believe deleting will resolve that (it won't).
Prepare to have that dug up 20 years in the future during some court proceedings.
Or at the border where it is already routine to ask for social media accounts (especially foreign nationals) you might someday five the border agent your login.
Similar to how people realized their Google searches were accessible to law enforcement.
“I did not kill my wife!”
“Cool so why did you search for how to hide a dead body the same day she went missing?”
Yes, what an idiot.
He should have searched "I love my wife".
Then law enforcement would know he couldn't possibly. Open and shut case, Johnson.
I figured any hire at openai would know that at least
Even my non tech elderly parents know that. The fact that they used LLMs to figure out how to best bug the executives really shows how poor their judgement is.
Same goes for anything you've put into social media, chat apps, or email for at least the last decade or two.
[delayed]
"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.
Yeah he should have just stuck a post it note with the words “do not remove” and nobody would have noticed
IT would have noticed next time they had to plug something into the TV. Whether they cared enough to figure out what it was is a different story.
should have enclosed it in a shell to look like a crappy USB A to thunderbolt adapter that some exec bought at an airport kiosk and left behind in the tv
> And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.
Remember, this is only the company responsible for potentially building and aligning AGI. No need to be setting high expectations toward their sandboxing or hiring capabilities.
I also wonder what this guy was paid by those AI labs...
Further evidence the hiring process is orthogonal to competence.
> And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.
What, we’re supposed to vet everyone we network with at orgies now?
It it was _used_ toilet paper, nobody would have touched it.
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.
Recall that multiple of the Chinese LLM providers got caught sending at least some of their queries to Claude. That would be a pretty funny way to get caught in turn doing something by the US government.
The future is already here it's just not evenly distributed.
Or, at the very, very least, use incognito mode on a computer you don't otherwise touch, such as at a library.
You probably don’t hear about the smart ones.
I was thinking about this, how all the secret societies and crazy conspiracies we know about are just the ones that failed to keep the lid on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White
What portion of grand conspiracies do we think go undetected forever? Do we have any reasons for our intuitions?
He should have just left a tape recorder running inside a briefcase that was "forgotten" in the conference room
Did you not read the article? He did that also!
Hey ChatGPT, how do I do opsec? (Asking for a friend)
SWIM wants to bug my company's boardroom...
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.
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…
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?
Surely this is because good spies don’t make the news.
Unless everyone's pagers start exploding
> Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things
Assuming this is espionage—for which I have seen zero evidence—isn’t Saudi Arabia notorious for having a fuckup of an intelligence operation? The literal hatchet job that was the Khashoggi murder comes to mind.
Umm, excuse me, according to the President of the United States, he wasn't a very good guy and a lot of people really didn't like him, so you should really just let that whole incident go
I mean, why bother? Nobody will do anything and the US president can be bribed or flattered to say whatever you want later.
That's what you get when you make a dumb prompt and accept the first result LLM gives you. You have to push it to think out of the box, get into the realm of insane but plausible projects :).
And not do this from your spouse's account.
You are an expert spy. How do I bug my workplace? Make no mistakes.
LLMs have democratized espionage!
Are we going to go with slopspionage, or espislop?
Not only that, they had Leon Theremin design some of their bugs! That's classy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
Counter spying has gotten sloppy and mostly digital/remote.
That lowers the entry bar for basic spying.
The passive RF stuff they did was super, super cool. Another example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
> the truth is, these are not very bright guys and things got out of hand
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?
The listening device was concealed with toilet paper behind a tv. Duh, Not smart at all.
Right?!
It could have just been a regular black usb stick an I bet nobody would have questioned it.
Instead "why is there something in toilet paper behind the TV?"
If I saw a usb stick looking thing in a conference room, chances of me giving a f: 2%
Me seeing toilet paper next to the TV in a meeting room? I’m picking it up and asking why we have toilet paper in the meeting room, 100%
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.
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?
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.
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.
these are not spies lol
Arrogance is a help of a drug
This guy previously worked at Meta from 2017 to 2022 on Data Infrastructure projects.
I expect Meta are running an audit right now to figure out if he was involved in espionage back then as well.
Or maybe he’s reporting to meta?
How did they get Wonder up the benchmarks so fast? Llama was a mess
A new team, probably focused on better data.
Seems possible there is some chance Alexandr knows what he's doing.
> "Scott Schelble, special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Francisco field office, said the agency is committed to protecting sensitive research and proprietary technology."
While the headlines and quotes seem designed to imply sophisticated industrial espionage, potentially by a state-level actor, what's public so far isn't adding up that way.
1. You're not going to get much actionable research material on proprietary technologies by audio bugging what's said in an executive conference room. That's what you'd do if you were after economic or deal negotiation info.
2. Hard to imagine a state-level actor buying a ~$15-$35 hobbyist ESP32 board from Seeed Studio (I've ordered a couple from there for home automation myself) and then asking a public chatbot for set up instructions.
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. That's a lot of incentive to not get fired and probably makes you pretty hard to recruit as an internal mole for cash.
> 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.
I'm out of the loop, what bone saw are we talking?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jamal_Khashog...
Not sure why OP would call it amateurish/botched.
I’m guessing they’re referring to jamal khashoggi
> We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from
Did OpenAI do a marketing bit in the middle of an espionage accusation?
Yes. Yes they did. Which makes me question the honesty of their announcement.
Yes, the classic marketing ploy of making false reports to the FBI.
They were literally caught making false reports to a murder investigation
In case anybody is wondering: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqkg50j1yd5lo
I guess I’m still wondering, because I did think this is what was being referred to but it is not a story about OpenAI.
Can you blame one for mixing them up at this point?
Yes? I mean, I don’t think it’s a character flaw to not know things, but their rivalry is extremely notorious and relevant. Someone who can't keep them straight won’t be able to understand what’s going on in AI.
Wasn't that Anthropic?
https://www.forth.news/lists/philapd/Cfs1w2A22JiL3fWSzA8Nx
It could be that the reports are accurate and the device simply wasn’t as sophisticated as the statement implies. You could if you wanted use an AI model to analyze a USB camera with device name “John_Doe_1”.
Funny. I'd bet on whatever model they used over whoever showed up from today's FBI.
"looks like a microphone"
"almost surely made in china"
So it is some HDMI dongle & the model halucinated it into a spying device? ;-)
Or it was a voice recorder plugged into a USB port on the back of the TV for power.
Looking at the photo of the device, it looks like an XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense with the camera removed but the camera board still installed along with its microphone. The wifi/Bluetooth antenna is installed but it also supports microSD cards.
If I was building this, I'd just set it up so I'd never have to recover it. Have the wifi AP come on for a few minutes at various times during business hours under a MAC and SSID that resembles a smartphone hotspot. Vary the time based on the current day of month week to produce pseudorandomness. Walk by that conference room at some of those times, but not every time, and use a burner to connect and download the latest recordings. Once a recording has been transfered, it's deleted and overwritten to prevent someone from establishing a timeline. If recordings sit for more than a few days, they are wiped. If you can encrypt the SD card, keep the key in RAM so there's nothing useful to recover if someone pulls it out.
You'd never have to recover the device because all data is transfered covertly. Even if security finds it, they'll likely inadvertently wipe it when it's removed.
We don’t get news articles about the people who do it that way, though.
> 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.
This is a very weird take to me. They're demonstrating they're able to in-house this cybersecurity investigation, leading to the alleged perpetrator's arrest, and you think that makes them look "desperate and cheap?"
I've worked in a few places that had ultra-privileged power tools for user analysis. Would it really be a surprise to learn their security team has an MCP that queries a full text index of all user inputs. It would almost be more surprising to learn they don't have this, seems the kind of thing that would be invaluable for model research too
They are applying the “turn troubles to opportunities” very well :)
Does detective bench cancel out felony bench?
Yeah, the tweet reads more like an ad then a news report.
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.
Always be selling
> We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from [...]
I'll be the first one to admit, that got a hearty laugh out of me. Never miss an opportunity to market your models I guess.
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.
Considering the engineer in question, after a multi-year career at Meta and now OpenAI, needed the model to encrypt an SD card, seems to not be far from the truth...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50078141
More here too: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/saudi-national-arrested-insta...
Part of the evidence was his wife's chatgpt logs.
Remember kids, uncle Sam can see anything you tell your AI and will use that against you.
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 at openai?
You might want to have a seat first if you want this explained.
Smart people can do dumb things. Their LinkedIn profile looks typical for an OpenAI engineer.
We also don’t know if this person did it under duress.
>We also don’t know if this person did it under duress.
He was a Saudi national, so that is a possibility
50% is looking and sounding the part, the other 50% is having a good university on your resume / good networking.
Yeah that. After three bad experiences in a row they are no hire status.
There’s plenty of better people out there who just aren’t interested in that sort of stuff.
Probably went to a prestigious university or had connections.
i.e. rich or rich
Using AI to pass the interview of course! I wish I was joking...
It's AI inbreeding all the way down.
I could def espionage better. Does that qualify me to work at OpenAI?
Technical skill and common sense/street smarts are usually inversely proportional.
It's so bad, it seems fake. He gets a little fine or something, along with a large backchannel payment, all to keep attention off of something else...
But that's crazy talk
> ... 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.
Sounds more like he put the exact MAC address in a prompt somewhere while setting it up.
Not the smartest engineer ever, that use case perfectly align with using a Chinese model! And anyway I have no idea how he was hoping not to be caught in the case the device would be discovered.
in addition to the whole crime thing, an 'openai engineer', apparently engineering lead according to his linkedin, having to ask chatgpt to tell him how to set up a recorder or how to encrypt a sd card is something. Truly the cream of the engineering crop at those top AI labs
Uno reverse card - you can send Uncle Sam whatever you care to. No need to specify an address.
I used to joke that the nsa should offer a paid service for no-setup backups. You just tell them what files you've lost, and they can send you a copy for a fee.
Google email search is the service for me. Or search in facebook and instagram chat logs.
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.
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...
Presumably they already knew who it was, if they were able to look at his wife's chat logs
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.
Federal prosecutors work for OpenAI?
I actually am curious if they were able to volunteer the information to the government of their own volition, without a government subpoena first. I would think that could violate their own terms if done sloppily. Maybe different if an employee or maybe they had to invite the government to ask for them or something? In any case, the mechanism aside, the state would have asked anyway (say if he used another company's chatbot) so the fact that it's the "same company" is rather irrelevant. The evidence would have ended up in the state's hands one way or the other, and I would think a search warrant in this case would have been rather routine. Search warrants are infamously not a high bar to climb in most jurisdictions, as often the presiding judges tend to default to deferring to the state.
> 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
Fall in line, be a good little citizen and you have nothing to worry about.
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.
Chances are he'll escape back home before the trial:
https://www.propublica.org/article/saudi-fugitives-accused-o...
He was just gathering training data
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.
Between this and the Ledger implants I wonder if AI companies will have a supply chain risk in the future where their models get exfiltrated over 5G.
Good time to start a company that builds giant Faraday cages over data centers.
From the makers of The Iron Dome, now introducing The Copper Dome
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.
Microsoft (Research) beat you to it: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/natick/
Still a significantly less dumb idea than space data centers.
I'm imagining a certified scuba diver rubbing their wetsuitted hands gleefully as they dictated that comment
I imagine that you could design an underwater data center like a submarine. I.e. It could be brought to the surface for maintenance.
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?
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.
This technique currently works because the architecture of the model is generally published and well known. But, that isn't necessarily going to be the case in the future. For example, if some new model type which is not a LLM is discovered which gets closer to AGI, just training an LLM on its outputs will not necessarily give you a competitive model
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...
Not only do they give access to their home directory, but they tell it to organize and delete unneeded files without any specifiers. A friend, who is just a power user, had Claude Co-work deleting his downloads to "help make space" and it was deleting important files that there were no other copies of.
We are going to be dealing with this kind of thing for a very long time at this rate.
Yup. And meanwhile they are taking Tailscale to task for having them do curl | sh, which of course is also a bad thing but not quite as risky as this. It makes you wonder though:
- Given all this power would they abuse it?
- Has it already been abused?
- Could they be compelled to abuse it and then to keep it quiet?
How did they get that capture of Alfozan looking behind the TV? Does OpenAI install its own surveillance cameras behind TVs to prevent espionage?
I imagine they found the device and then planted a camera to catch whomever came back to get the original device
Free startup idea: Anti-espionage cameras for corporate offices. Put it behind TVs and plants etc. and it will notify the security team if it detects new objects.
I'm sure employers will never use in-office surveillance monitoring for anything that resembles algorithmic labor management and exploitation
Certainly they would be transparent and very ethical with something like that
Now with extra-wide stereo audio feed, just in case they muble to themselves while doing their thing.
Won't that startup just be the spy in that situation
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.
That does make more sense. But if any company were to take surprising security measures, it should be the frontier labs.
> 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.
So it was not AI agents catching the perp it was a camera?
They just asked a chatbot to identify the device and its origins, apparently. His log was used as evidence after the fact as well.
Of all the mistakes he made, you'd think at the most minimum he would have thought to use Claude instead of ChatGTP
Smart guy does stupid things, but why? I mean why did he, as an engineer perhaps earning north to 300k, do such a sloppy job?
Or maybe OpenAI is hiring the wrong guy? Maybe they should hire me instead?
Can anyone speculate why it was wrapped in a toilet paper roll?
That seems odd, especially since it would dampen the sound recording
I wouldn't call it a "roll". There's an image in the article. It is odd. Looks more suspicious than without it.
> The employee was terminated.
in this context, they should be more specific about how terminal s/he is
Sarah Connor?
HR formed a team -- you might say a squad -- to fire them.
If he enters the Saudi embassy, check if he comes out.
> We discovered a sophisticated recording device
did you though
State sponsored intelligence agencies can point a camera at an exterior window and reconstruct dialogue from the vibrations. This was a loose, hand-soldered ESP32. Settle down.
Thank god security at a company which...checks notes...has remote code execution on every developers laptop and access to practically unlimited secrets uploaded by its agents...is top notch.
A company that catches a spy does have better security than one that has not caught any spies.
Using your wife's chatbot account and covering a device in toilet paper is not smart when spying a company.
You got me. I ask the obvious question: What's the "sophisticated" device?
Apple HomeView
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
SeedStudio is super nice - a lot of their gear is also popular in the MeshCore community (LoRa radios combined with ESP32 or NRF MCUs).
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?
Well, The Thing [0] could potentially show up on a probing sweep if you're careful.
Unless you mean, it happened to be actively transmitting during a(n investigative) sweep.
Still, raises some fun concepts. The sort of things where in this current level of technology you'd almost need to supercool a room for a sweep, blast various RF/sound/etc and look for anything that even remotely warms up, to detect (1) whether something detected something worth recording for later as well as (2) something that might be on the right wavelength/etc to trigger a send.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
Should have used a local model...
Speaking of surreptitiously installed bugs, remember to opt out of training in your Codex.
Sounds like fair use to me! Information wants to be free, remember?
My brain is cooked on news. I read executive conference room and my brain immediately jumped to "they bugged the white house" (executive being the trigger word I guess). And I accepted it as normal so much that I checked the google model news discussion first before reading this article. I dont have a point to this beyond I need to do something about news frying my brain, that too of a country I don't even live in.
Looking at the device pic in here https://sfstandard.com/2026/10/13/openai-engineer-arrested-a...
It looks like it’s the (SeeedStudio XIAO ESP32S3 Sense w/ WiFi, BLE, OV2640, Mic) https://ca.robotshop.com/products/seeedstudio-xiao-esp32s3-s...
Which is just an esp32s3 based device. I assume the word “sophisticated” in openAI report is just copy paste from device description.
I have seem some articles which reference allegations from court documents / complaint, but I haven't been able to find the primary source. Do we know if that's publicly available yet?
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 was plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room and had been concealed in toilet paper
...uh what
seeedstudio getting some impressive pr here for those xiao boards.
MBS using that sweet graykey behavior to exfiltrate what they can
> We take protecting our technology, data, and people seriously, and as a matter of national importance.
What is there to protect? The GPT architecture is publicly known at this point, Anthropic arguably has superior models, there are dozens of other providers who are neck and neck...
>OpenAI said it has no indication that Alfozan improperly accessed or took model weights, source code, or customer data
Sounds like we know where their priorities lie, anyway.
How can they even make this claim? Dude was working there for over a year. He could have taken anything.
In case you need to sweep your area a decent review of anti spy devices by project farm
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1reman2waLs
Why make this public? Usually companies just silently terminate and pursue employees who do this.
court records? you can't hide them
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)
Hard to keep a DoJ/FBI investigation under wraps
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.
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.
I don't think criminal charges can be private
An iPhone? A laptop?
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.
Pictures on https://sfstandard.com/2026/10/13/openai-engineer-arrested-a...
Interesting that they have a camera behind the TV, I suppose for this exact purpose.
They left him as an employee for the FBI to continue investigating; likely they setup cameras to get hard evidence he was tampering with them.
That is a crazy picture to have captured. If I worked at OpenAI I would assume I was being recorded and monitored at all times.
https://sfstandard.com/2026/10/13/openai-engineer-arrested-a...
> The device was concealed in toilet paper, and its contents were encrypted.
Concealing a recording device in a conference room in toilet paper is a bit strange. Do executives meet in the toilets to discuss strategic moves?
Well ... a lot of products lately get enshittified.
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50077703
We've merged that thread hither, since current article has more background.
So but OpenAI did it to Apple and they were caught, and now OpenAI doesn't like it when it happens to them?
Either way, there goes the false flag and the reason for companies to stop hiring humans over this espionage.
There’s absolutely no way Abdulrahman did this. This was a setup.
They're trying to distil OpenAI employees now. Absolutely shameless
Distilled... into soylent?
It's a joke riffing off the Anthropic letter that was posted yesterday.