He linked Saudi Arabia to Silicon Valley. Then OpenAI found a bug wrapped in toilet paper

Abdulrahman Alfozan was scheduled to speak at an event at Stanford University last Friday, with the computer engineer considered a draw as a rare Saudi national also working at OpenAI.

Twenty minutes before the talk the 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 the 35-year-old had been arrested by the FBI, after the ChatGPT maker 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 had 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 from OpenAI is a dramatic fall from grace for Alfozan, who has cited Elon Musk as a role model, and previously been lauded in local media as a tech pioneer who has 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 also seeking to gain an advantage in the global AI race.

When Gulf contacts woke up to the news of Alfozan’s arrest, there was a deep sense of shock among those who knew him as both a brilliant engineer and the father of a young daughter.

He was invariably described as polite and gentle-spoken by those who dealt with him. “He can’t harm a fly,” one of them said. “Very aloof person. His mind always seemed to be elsewhere.”

As recently as last month, Alfozan was a constant presence in the overlapping circles between Silicon Valley and Saudi Arabia. The nation’s Public Investment Fund is a prominent investor in US tech start-ups and had previously held talks to fund OpenAI.

When Saudi tech influencers travelled to San Francisco for Apple’s iPhone 18 launch in September, it was Alfozan who welcomed them to OpenAI offices where he gave them tours.

“The only Saudi employee at OpenAI!” tech influencer Faisal al-Saif said on Snapchat. “We are very proud of you!” he added, before asking for advice for young people who wanted to specialise in AI.

When Saudi Arabia’s influential IT minister Abdullah al-Swaha visited the city that same week for a conference backed by the kingdom, Alfozan hosted a roundtable at the event.

He is also listed as a venture partner at Riyadh-based Raed Ventures, which has invested in a number of start-ups in the Middle East. In a release last year announcing Alfozan’s hire, founding partner Omar Almajdouie said that Alfozan possessed a “deep understanding” of the start-up ecosystem.

Born in the ultraconservative central region of Qassim, Alfozan grew up in Dammam in the kingdom’s oil-rich Eastern Province. His fascination with technology began during computer science classes in middle school. Seeing passion, his parents bought him a PC and enrolled him in a government-backed special programme for gifted children to develop skills in mathematics, physics and engineering.

“He would read the encyclopedia cover to cover,” his father said in a documentary about Alfozan aired on Saudi TV, while describing taking the boy to book fairs.

After finishing high school, Alfozan received a full scholarship from King Abdullah University for Science and Technology, the kingdom’s first research and first co-educational university, to study computer science and electrical engineering in the US.

He then studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and interned for many start-ups. After a graduation in 2016 he accepted an offer from Facebook and moved to California.

“I chose Facebook for several reasons: first, they have a science team for data science and data analysis,” he told a government-produced video that was published by the Ministry of Media during Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to the US in April 2018 as an example of young Saudi talent flourishing in Silicon Valley.

Alfozan said his plan was to return home by 2020 to help develop the local economy and work in Saudi start-ups.

He ended up staying in San Francisco, and in May of that year a project he co-developed won the $50,000 top prize in a Saudi local hackathon. As he appeared in the video where the winners were announced, he had a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge as his Zoom background.

“There were only four or five Saudis when I first arrived to the Valley in 2015 or 2016, now there are more than 50,” he said in another video published by the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya channel.

One of his Saudi classmates at MIT told state television in 2023 that Alfozan was “very generous, always helpful”. Another Saudi contact described how, when he applied for a job at Facebook, Alfozan helped him with a referral.

After several years at Facebook, he helped found a logistics start-up, Nash, before joining OpenAI last year. He has been a permanent legal US resident since 2020.

Even though he visited Saudi Arabia several times every year, after more than a decade living in the US he was missing being updated on what was happening as the kingdom was rapidly transforming under Prince Mohammed’s ambitious Vision 2030 agenda.

Three years ago he developed an app that crawled trending Google searches and Twitter hashtags then displayed them moving on a large screen in his office. “Every time I pass by the screen I would know what people are talking about in Saudi Arabia,” he said.

The FBI has not given a motive for the alleged spying, but if proven to be state-related this will be the second high-profile case of this nature after two Saudi citizens were implicated in a case inside Twitter — since renamed X — infiltrating the company and sharing user data on dissidents and critics with Saudi authorities.

Ali Alzabarah and Ahmed Aljbreen were both charged by the FBI and fled to Saudi Arabia before being arrested. The latter remains active in the Saudi entrepreneurial scene, often posting on Snapchat about hosting young business leaders and posting about local start-ups.

Saudi tech workers said the latest incident would badly damage their ability to find jobs with top US companies or attract VC investment for their start-ups, given Alfozan’s prominence as an intermediary between the two tech scenes.

He told the state news agency last year: “We are very keen to connect those interested in tech from Saudi Arabia with peers from Silicon Valley.”