FBI arrests OpenAI employee for planting listening device in office

Video Transcript

a story came out of one of the frontier labs that's open AI, a really shocking disclosure coming out of there that one of their employees who's now been arrested by the Justice Department.

By the FBI, yeah.

By the FBI and being charged by the Justice Department, had planted a microphone, and it looks like two microphones inside Open AI's offices. One of those was left in a backpack, but one of them was planted into a TV in a conference room that is reserved for only executives and really high-level secure discussions.

It sounds like what happened is that he had plugged a US like a basically a little uh server piece into the back of the TV with a microphone on it, wrapped it in toilet paper.

Someone at some point

What was the to I'm so confused about the toilet paper.

So I I have a thought here. I have a thought here.

The toilet paper. What are we what's going on?

I I have a thought. Someone at some point, housekeeping, someone fiddling with the back of the TV trying to get it to turn on, noticed it and they started rigging up cameras.

And there's an amazing shot that came out of the indictment where this this guy, this open eye employee is leaning over the back of the TV and the CCTV catches him looking right at the mic that he had planted and then they ended up arresting him.

Um the the guy, his name is Abdul Rahman Al-Fazan, is a 35-year-old Saudi national. He does work at Open AI. This is not someone who snuck into the office. He's an Open AI employee.

Right. And he's he's lived in the US for years and he's worked at multiple tech companies.

He's lived in

Right, he's worked at Meta before, I think.

Yes.

That's right. The Justice Department has not released a motive. They have not said who is behind any of this, whether he's acting alone or whatever else. However, some of the sloppiness of this, like the toilet paper, would make me think this is probably not a state actor,

Mmm.

but it very well could be. CFO Sarah Fryer telling Bloomberg this morning that obviously they can't comment because of the ongoing Justice Department investigation, but that they are taking security very seriously and taking steps forward.

Right. Of course, of course.

The one weird thing we just want to quickly mention is the fact that they said they used, you mentioned this before how they used

they used their AI to figure out what was happening.

I was talking about this this morning. Yeah, they found it and they were like, where is this from? I don't really understand. they then would have I don't know.

Yeah.

I don't understand how they used the AI to then get to the bottom of it.

Yeah, yeah.

And then the AI's like, hey, call the FBI.

Maybe the maybe the AI swept the camera feeds or something. Maybe that's how it did it.

Or like did you just take a picture of the little thing and say, Hey, what is this thing?

What is this thing? What is this thing? I think they actually that was part of it actually. They were trying to source it. Like, what is this weird thing we found?

What is this thing?

Where does this come from? Well, now we all have an interesting use case for how we what we can do with at our own homes.

This toilet paper wrap thing.

That's true.