San Francisco Judge Denies Bail to Engineer Accused of Bugging OpenAI HQ | KQED
An engineer at OpenAI was accused last week of placing a secret recording device at the company's San Francisco offices. On Monday, a judge ordered him to remain in jail without bail until his trial. Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse said there was a “significant” chance that he would flee, CNBC reported.
The decision came during a hearing at a San Francisco court. Tse questioned an offer from the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles to guarantee the full bail amount for Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi national.
Tse reportedly called the offer “problematic.” He asked why he should trust that the Saudi government would protect the interests of the U.S. government.
In a court document filed Sunday, prosecutors argued that Alfozan was “mere days away from leaving the United States for Saudi Arabia when he was arrested.” They also pointed to his earnings in the Bay Area, at least two Saudi bank accounts, and “what appears to be considerable support from a foreign government” that has no extradition treaty with the United States.
Before Monday's hearing, Alfozan's lawyer, William Pernik, told KQED in a letter that his client posed “no flight risk whatsoever.” He pointed to Alfozan's “long standing ties to the community.” According to The New York Times, Pernik also told the court that his client was “weeks away from achieving every immigrant's dream” of becoming a U.S. citizen.
“If he really was an agent of a foreign government, why wouldn't he just abscond right away?” Pernik said, according to The New York Times.
In their court filing on Sunday, prosecutors said Alfozan had often been in contact with a member of the Saudi royal family who tried to recruit him for a new Saudi artificial intelligence project. In one message, the royal family member told Alfozan that “Saudi needs you more” than the United States, prosecutors said.
According to prosecutors, Alfozan replied: “100.”
However, Alfozan said he would not leave OpenAI until his company stock became his to keep. According to the court filing, his stock award as a new employee was worth $2.2 million.
In a footnote, prosecutors referred to a 2019 case in the same court. In that case, a Twitter employee accused of spying for Saudi Arabia left the United States the day after the company confronted him. The U.S. government says his departure was arranged with the Saudi consul general in Los Angeles. He has never returned to face the charges.
Prosecutors also said that Alfozan's wife and their 3-month-old baby flew to Doha, Qatar, the day after his arrest. They traveled on a business-class ticket that a Saudi military official had booked and paid for. According to the court filing, his wife now lives in Saudi Arabia.
Alfozan has been in jail since his arrest. He is charged with using or trying to use an electronic, mechanical or other device to secretly record spoken conversations. If convicted, he could face up to five years in prison. OpenAI fired him after his arrest, but the company says it has no evidence that he improperly accessed or took AI model weights, source code or customer data.
Rory Little, a professor at UC Law San Francisco, said it was “no surprise” that Tse denied Alfozan bail, “given the one-way trip tickets and he's not a citizen.” Little also told KQED that he would be surprised if Alfozan's lawyers immediately appealed the decision.
Prosecutors said Alfozan came to the United States in 2009 and earned degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and UC Berkeley. He became a permanent resident in 2020 and joined OpenAI in July 2025.
According to The New York Times, Alfozan said in an Arabic podcast interview last month that he and other Saudi technology professionals in Silicon Valley had formed a group that advised Saudi organizations.
In a court filing made public last week in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, prosecutors explained how OpenAI's security team found a recording device about the size of a thumb on Sept. 30. The device was wrapped in toilet paper and plugged into the back of a television in a conference room for company executives. According to the criminal complaint, only executives and their assistants could book the room. It was used for leadership meetings and briefings with government officials.
Prosecutors said OpenAI employees then put a camera in the conference room. The camera recorded Alfozan checking behind the television on Oct. 5. That same day, security staff found a second device in a bag he had left in a room with printers, according to the complaint.
Last month, someone used a ChatGPT account linked to Alfozan's wife to ask how to build a device that could record sound continuously, connect to Wi-Fi, encrypt its memory card and hide its activity. Prosecutors also said Alfozan used an AI tool to list meeting rooms at OpenAI's offices and asked where “leadership and exec” meetings took place.
The case is a reminder that chatbot companies like OpenAI keep a lot of information about their users.
“Your chatbot conversations in general are less private than you might assume,” Riana Pfefferkorn of Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI wrote to KQED. She added that when a company is also the alleged victim in a case, it may be more willing to share information than it would be if it had to wait for a legal order requiring it to do so.
“Nearly every company logs your IP address when you create an account and/or login,” said Jen King, a privacy and data policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. King has studied the privacy policies of AI companies. “If you are not deleting your chats, and not using a temporary chat window, the chats associated with your account in most cases are kept indefinitely,” she added in an email to KQED.
Prosecutors wrote that whether Alfozan wanted to record meetings “to enrich himself by enhancing his own business prospects, or to provide aid [to] a foreign government, or both, his conduct is criminal.”
OpenAI, the U.S. Attorney's Office and the Saudi Consulate General did not respond to requests for comment.
Alfozan is due back in court on Nov. 6 for a hearing to discuss the next steps before a preliminary hearing. His lawyers said in a court filing that this is the same day he had been scheduled for his U.S. citizenship interview.