> 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.
There was a mom in Utah who killed her husband poisoning him with a moscow mule spiked with fentanyl who googled "luxury prisons for the rich" as well as "how long does life insrance companies takento.pay" "can you delete everythjng on an old icloud account" "can deleted text messages be retrieved" "what information can be cbtained from a cellphone" "how to turn find my iphone off" "can cops force you to do a lie detector test," "when does FBI get involved in a case," "what is considered a lethal.dose of fentanyl" and "what are you allowed inside utah jails."
She took out $2 million in life insurance on him and was having an affair with their handyman and they were having disputes about $$.
An essay it seems like, which wasn't included in the trial even:
> Crampton Brophy's how-to treatise detailed various options for committing an untraceable killing and professed a desire to avoid getting caught. Circuit Judge Christopher Ramras ultimately excluded the essay from the trial, noting it was published in 2011. A prosecutor, however, alluded to the essay's themes without naming it after Crampton Brophy took the stand.
Also makes it important to not let other people use your LLM account... Could have more far-reaching consequences than having to make good on the offer to buy doughnuts for the office^
^being the classic message that gets sent from the account of someone who didn't lock their computer when they walked away from their desk.
Or, more accurately, people make stupid mistakes when they lack the experience. Intelligent people often succumb to the fallacy that because they can learn things quickly, they can skip the learning part just figure things out as they go.
Before AI tools like Plaud.AI, this wasnt near possible because of work/time, and no person usually do not remember exactly who said what 6 month before,unless there is some email conversation.
With Plaud, you can check unlimited backwards who said what in which meeting and what was wanted to achieve - very interesting actually to find things in there 6m later, while people said they will do it at ends of month and youself just forgot it already - and these systems allow you to chase exactly these discrepancies.
This has been happening long before LLMs, and this eBay case is notable only for the fact that it was actually publicly documented and prosecuted, not for the fact that it happened. I've personally been privy to two situations with other companies where the owner was doing something like this but nothing came of it legally. See also Meta employees looking up nudes streamed from people's Meta spy glasses, and Flock-using police stalking their exes. Smaller scale, but this also happens all the time with internet community moderators/admins. Humans are on average cretins, give them authority and the ability to abuse it and they will abuse it.
A good chunk of what keeps openai and similar companies afloat is subpar people who are willing if not eager to do crappy stuff to other people. A lot of the world works this way actually.
The only word for it is hubris. The overwhelming sense that your ability in one area has some magical transitive property to ability in another.
Can I write code? Sure. Im a bad designer, I can follow along in accounting, Im a terrible actor.
I would guess that there is much more to this story than just someone "bugging" a conference room. Though I would venture to guess that the keystone cops never get to the bottom of it.
The weird thing is that I've had other HN users argue with me and claim that LLM chat users should be entitled to privacy, as if it were a priest or lawyer.
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.
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.
Seems like they select for people as dependent on their product as their customers. Maybe it helps them more to have true-believers rather than intelligent people.
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.
> 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
"You're mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial," Trump said, referring to Khashoggi. "A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen, but he knew nothing about it. And would you leave it at that? You don't have to embarrass our guest by asking a question."
In the 80s one of my high school teachers said her husband was an engineer who worked on surveillance technology and described how windows could be used as recording devices. People's voices inside caused the window to have minute vibrations, which could be measured by a laser pointing at the window's exterior and reflected back and then turned into audio output. Essentially, turning a window into a microphone diaphragm. It blew my mind.
I just looked it up, the technique was apparently invented by a Soviet engineer 40 years prior - Leon Theremin, who is also known for the musical wand heard on Led Zeppelin II and various 1960s horror movie soundtracks.
Vaguely similar, since electrical wires emit EM fields that are disturbed by human bodies, you can use a special camera to see who's in a building based on those disturbances. I'm not sure how high-fidelity or easy to spoil it is, but this was real technology at least 15 years ago.
This is a feature in modern wifi routers and every single one is capable of detecting presence of multiple people within an apartment. With some training, movement can be distinguished from the data.
Surely your conclusion should be that this was not the work of a spy - not a state sponsored one anyway. It's much more logical to conclude that he was working as a whistleblower or under some other personal agenda.
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 :).
Someone who's objectively closest to this business should know the tracability of this. I'm shocked he didn't run a local LLM for this kind of sensitive work.
He doesn't seem like an idiot either, his background shows he's been doing work in the field since 2012.
I do wonder how much he was paid to throw away what was without a doubt a 1% career.
I'll counter punching down on frontend engineers by positing that he was responsible for sandboxing their training infrastructure. Since clearly they don't know how to lock down an environment either without using llms
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.
Or hijack the TV's already always on mic. Just forward a copy of the audio to your server in addition to the one sent to Samsung or LG. WebOs and Tizen shouldn't be that hard to crack when you have access to unrestricted frontier models.
They could have just taped it to the inside bottom of a full tissue box, and as long as they got it before the tissues were mostly empty I bet it would go undetected. Put a hand sanitizer next to it for extra camo.
"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
The bar @ OAI is surprisingly low (watch a few minutes of their video presentations) - I've concluded it has something to do w how their recruiters define 'AI Native' (who assign their own meaning to meaninglessness of it), resulting in higher aggregate brain atrophy (hard to ignore once you notice it)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean they could have at -least- just used a home GPU to plan with complete privacy and no evidence. But using hardware of your employer to plan crimes against them, whp happens to be a surveillance capitalism company, is next level stupid.
Also like, just put malware in the tv itself or the little conference kiosk and have it send data as segonographied crash tv crash dumps going to an IP near the manufacturer. It is not like any of them are hard to jailbreak. I have compromised a few myself without any help from AI. The malware could have been installed from a laptop in a cafeteria one time ever using a spoofed mac address with no chance of getting caught.
In red teams at a past org we would go as far as installing malicious firmware inside peoples keyboards.
I would love dirt to leak on the inside operations of OpenAI so I kind of hope there are less stupid spies lurking about.
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.
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?
OpenAI added a camera behind the TV after they found the bug (per the AP story [1]):
The company subsequently added a camera to the room that last week captured Alfozan entering and checking behind the television where the recording device was installed, according to the FBI.
That photo is from October 5th so several days after they found the device. They were guessing he might return most likely, and installed a camera. I think at this moment he realized they caught on. Crazy image
A good friend of mine manages installs of AV equipment. He installs some neat equipment. Some of it is cool tech stuff HN would like. He says a lot of conference rooms have video and audio recording devices.
> "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. Executive level discussions – future launch decisions, major deals signed with other companies, relationships with governments, blackmail material – 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.
> 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.
They may have been thinking they could make >$5-10M on trading options on insider knowledge on upcoming OpenAI deals (or ending thereoff)
> That's a lot of incentive to not get fired and probably makes you pretty hard to recruit as an internal mole for cash.
Why is the word "poached" though, like it's illegal or those people "rightfully belongs" to OpenAI but now Facebook "stole" them somehow? Feels like something Steve Jobs would coin just to make it sound worse than it is. People switch jobs, this is OK.
> The man arrested for planting a secret recording device at OpenAI's headquarters is a Venture Partner of a VC firm alongside the son of a senior Saudi intelligence official:
There are a few people like this. They constantly eavesdrop on everyone and everything around them (via tools).
I knew a guy who, in the 1990's, had "gator spying tool" installed on his work PC, and then would casually invite people to use his PC (not everyone had a work PC back then), and then snag their passwords. And then spy on their private email. Was dumb enough to tell me, and then tried to get me to use his PC. No thank you bruh.
I've worked in a few places that had ultra-privileged analysis tools, 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, seems the kind of thing that would be invaluable for model research too
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?"
That sentence, which is prominently high up in the press release and is also included in the much shorter OAI tweet, definitely seems out of place (source: I've been involved in drafting a lot of F500 corporate press releases). In my quite-professional opinion, that sentence wasn't in the first or second drafts, which were probably written and reviewed by competent pros at OAI's large, national PR agency. Some exec at OAI with a VP or higher title suggested adding it and specifically wanted it featured prominently.
Press releases from large corporations announcing the FBI arrest of an employee under allegations of potential industrial espionage follow a standard format: dry, brief and to the point. They provide little context and volunteer few details for very good reasons. Prosecutors haven't filed official charges yet and it's likely going to criminal trial. In a couple days the accused will have a defense attorney who'll be examining everything that's been publicly said because it's now all discoverable and potentially prejudicial, opening up OAI executives to super-fun depositions. But... none of the competent PR professionals involved have a VP title and got overruled by an amateur who does (and that amateur apparently feels needy about highlighting in a brief, sober arrest report how the company's product was so, very useful in a national security investigation - because apparently neither OAI security nor the FBI could read the Seeed Studio logo and part number printed right on the device and, y'know, Google the product listing).
Because the whole device and MO has the complexity of a high school science fair project, and in the past tech companies preferred to project the image of having competent and knowledgeable people working there?
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.
Yes, that is a better way of doing it. But it wouldn't really protect you.
If I was running the investigation and recovered a device like you described I'd create a new device with the same hotspot that notified security whenever someone connected. Combine that with security cameras outside the conference room and finding the person with the burner phone would be pretty easy.
Actually recovering the recordings isn't all that vital. I'm sure the meeting room has a record of bookings so you can just ask the people what was discussed.
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”.
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...
> 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.
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...
> ... 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 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.
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 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.
I wonder how much state-sponsored corporate espionage there is. I'm not an OpenAI employee, but my mental model of tech startups involves a lot of openness/trust (it's one of the reasons people work there).
I have to imagine many techniques/plans/figures are open secrets to nation states.
So, just so I understand, it’s ok to record conversations with ChatGPT users, train on their data, copy their features, front run their solutions to frontier math problems, all using intelligence extracted from the body of human writing from a data set from Russia known to be pirated. But recording a conversation in a conference room is grounds for termination.
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.
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?
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
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?
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.”
His Github is crazy, he pushed changed to official public OpenAI repos and in October all his commits are to private repos. I would check that first as an investigator.
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.
He may be a spy, but he’s not a competent spy. Absence of evidence (of spies) is not evidence of absence (of spies). He just set the bar so low that even OpenAI noticed his activities.
why can AI counter "sophisticated security threats" if the device was found with a bug sweep? because they gave chatgpt a image of the encrypted device and it "assessed changes in the underlying data"?
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.
Someone probably walked by or went to plug in an HDMI and noticed the stark contrast of white toilet paper against a black TV shell, it would be difficult not to notice.
lol… I hope I get to see the TV Show depicting the current era inside AI labs. It’ll give both The Sopranos and The Wire a run for their money for sure.
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?
Concealed in toilet paper? We are definitely not dealing with James Bond, that is a pretty hilariously backwards way of going about things. Did he really think that would be less suspicious looking than the dongle itself?
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.
Now this is the kind of wacky shit I want to see happening in corporate America. When are we going to see an action movie-style GPU heist? I want to see whole palettes of GPUs stolen out of box trucks.
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.
> 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...
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.
> 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.
“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?”
She took out $2 million in life insurance on him and was having an affair with their handyman and they were having disputes about $$.
https://www.ktvu.com/news/utah-mom-kouri-richins-googled-lux...
After she killed him she authored a children's book about grief for kids.
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/26/1101433465/how-to-murder-your...
> Crampton Brophy's how-to treatise detailed various options for committing an untraceable killing and professed a desire to avoid getting caught. Circuit Judge Christopher Ramras ultimately excluded the essay from the trial, noting it was published in 2011. A prosecutor, however, alluded to the essay's themes without naming it after Crampton Brophy took the stand.
He should have searched "I love my wife".
Then law enforcement would know he couldn't possibly. Open and shut case, Johnson.
^being the classic message that gets sent from the account of someone who didn't lock their computer when they walked away from their desk.
Or, more accurately, people make stupid mistakes when they lack the experience. Intelligent people often succumb to the fallacy that because they can learn things quickly, they can skip the learning part just figure things out as they go.
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.
With Plaud, you can check unlimited backwards who said what in which meeting and what was wanted to achieve - very interesting actually to find things in there 6m later, while people said they will do it at ends of month and youself just forgot it already - and these systems allow you to chase exactly these discrepancies.
What is "work" to an executive if not using their privileged access to data to violate the privacy of anyone they have a grievance against?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
This has been happening long before LLMs, and this eBay case is notable only for the fact that it was actually publicly documented and prosecuted, not for the fact that it happened. I've personally been privy to two situations with other companies where the owner was doing something like this but nothing came of it legally. See also Meta employees looking up nudes streamed from people's Meta spy glasses, and Flock-using police stalking their exes. Smaller scale, but this also happens all the time with internet community moderators/admins. Humans are on average cretins, give them authority and the ability to abuse it and they will abuse it.
The only word for it is hubris. The overwhelming sense that your ability in one area has some magical transitive property to ability in another.
Can I write code? Sure. Im a bad designer, I can follow along in accounting, Im a terrible actor.
I would guess that there is much more to this story than just someone "bugging" a conference room. Though I would venture to guess that the keystone cops never get to the bottom of it.
Company is another.
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.
I gots to know...
Paul Graham years ago: “I can’t publicly comment on all this stuff. I would turn into Noam Chomsky.”
Paul Graham on X last couple years…not exactly following his earlier advice.
They get you eventually.
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.
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.
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?
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.
https://www.npr.org/2025/11/18/nx-s1-5612504/trump-saudi-ara...
I just looked it up, the technique was apparently invented by a Soviet engineer 40 years prior - Leon Theremin, who is also known for the musical wand heard on Led Zeppelin II and various 1960s horror movie soundtracks.
https://people.ece.uw.edu/nikitin_pavel/papers/RFID-vox_2013...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKXOucXB4a8
https://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/VisualMic/
espionage -> espislop
007 -> 006.999997
And not do this from your spouse's account.
That lowers the entry bar for basic spying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
Someone who's objectively closest to this business should know the tracability of this. I'm shocked he didn't run a local LLM for this kind of sensitive work.
He doesn't seem like an idiot either, his background shows he's been doing work in the field since 2012.
I do wonder how much he was paid to throw away what was without a doubt a 1% career.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White
Does not understand how models or data retention works.
Needs LLMs to encrypt a flash card.
Are their hiring standards that lax?
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.
-- Dr. No
These AI companies are likely targets of multiple foreign intelligence agencies, similar to military contractors.
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?"
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%
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.
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.
What, we’re supposed to vet everyone we network with at orgies now?
> 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…
What might tilt the bayesian balance in favour of political intent would be the nationality of the individual, state or religious sponsoring become hypotheses.
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?
Also like, just put malware in the tv itself or the little conference kiosk and have it send data as segonographied crash tv crash dumps going to an IP near the manufacturer. It is not like any of them are hard to jailbreak. I have compromised a few myself without any help from AI. The malware could have been installed from a laptop in a cafeteria one time ever using a spoofed mac address with no chance of getting caught.
In red teams at a past org we would go as far as installing malicious firmware inside peoples keyboards.
I would love dirt to leak on the inside operations of OpenAI so I kind of hope there are less stupid spies lurking about.
To any spies still at OpenAI: do better.
Here is a direct link to Figure 3:
https://assets.sfstandard.com/image/994911177489/image_bfl33...
[0] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/saudi-national-arrested-insta...
edit: Asked and answered here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50078735
Step 2. Place trail camera behind bug
Step 3. Record faces that look at bug
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.
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.
Not sure why OP would call it amateurish/botched.
They may have been thinking they could make >$5-10M on trading options on insider knowledge on upcoming OpenAI deals (or ending thereoff)
> That's a lot of incentive to not get fired and probably makes you pretty hard to recruit as an internal mole for cash.
Most criminals assume they won't get caught.
but I guess the $1 million was not incentive enough to not commit a dumb insider trading scheme...
I expect Meta are running an audit right now to figure out if he was involved in espionage back then as well.
https://x.com/ScottMStedman/status/2110108735855333403?s=20
I knew a guy who, in the 1990's, had "gator spying tool" installed on his work PC, and then would casually invite people to use his PC (not everyone had a work PC back then), and then snag their passwords. And then spy on their private email. Was dumb enough to tell me, and then tried to get me to use his PC. No thank you bruh.
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.
Press releases from large corporations announcing the FBI arrest of an employee under allegations of potential industrial espionage follow a standard format: dry, brief and to the point. They provide little context and volunteer few details for very good reasons. Prosecutors haven't filed official charges yet and it's likely going to criminal trial. In a couple days the accused will have a defense attorney who'll be examining everything that's been publicly said because it's now all discoverable and potentially prejudicial, opening up OAI executives to super-fun depositions. But... none of the competent PR professionals involved have a VP title and got overruled by an amateur who does (and that amateur apparently feels needy about highlighting in a brief, sober arrest report how the company's product was so, very useful in a national security investigation - because apparently neither OAI security nor the FBI could read the Seeed Studio logo and part number printed right on the device and, y'know, Google the product listing).
"almost surely made in china"
Plumb your video feed of your executive conference room into our DC and we'll tell you if anybody is spying on you.
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.
If I was running the investigation and recovered a device like you described I'd create a new device with the same hotspot that notified security whenever someone connected. Combine that with security cameras outside the conference room and finding the person with the burner phone would be pretty easy.
Actually recovering the recordings isn't all that vital. I'm sure the meeting room has a record of bookings so you can just ask the people what was discussed.
https://www.forth.news/lists/philapd/Cfs1w2A22JiL3fWSzA8Nx
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.
He thought be could make SA an llm world power or smth by doing this, this guy is just clueless
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
We also don’t know if this person did it under duress.
He was a Saudi national, so that is a possibility
There’s plenty of better people out there who just aren’t interested in that sort of stuff.
It's AI inbreeding all the way down.
But that's crazy talk
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...
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.
They can confiscate your computers, too.
This person, of all people, would know this. He really thought he’d never get caught.
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.
https://www.propublica.org/article/saudi-fugitives-accused-o...
I have to imagine many techniques/plans/figures are open secrets to nation states.
Got it.
Good time to start a company that builds giant Faraday cages over data centers.
"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...
We are going to be dealing with this kind of thing for a very long time at this rate.
- 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 cooling, safe from missile attack, and safe from some types of electronic spying.
Still a significantly less dumb idea than space data centers.
The alignment people would like you worry about the model exfiltrating itself, too.
https://x.com/alfozan
Not too much there. A link to Tim Urban's "Your Life in Weeks" infographic. Life is short, dream big.
Certainly they would be transparent and very ethical with something like that
“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.
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.
https://github.com/alfozan
in this context, they should be more specific about how terminal s/he is
That seems odd, especially since it would dampen the sound recording
But maybe he didn't put a case on the device? I think if he'd 3D printed something or wrapped it in black tape it would have been a lot less visible.
I wonder if it was found when someone was trying to plug a cable into the TV?
ChatGPT: wait I'm considering if an inconspicuous piece of toilet paper should be wrapped about the device
Back of a TV is a decent hiding place. Wonder how they found it -was it actively transmitting?
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)
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
Or maybe OpenAI is hiring the wrong guy? Maybe they should hire me instead?
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.
...uh what
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1reman2waLs
(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)
> “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.
This isn’t uncommon, but it’s rare this info is shared in such detail publicly..possibly to make an example.
Sounds like we know where their priorities lie, anyway.
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?
And not just at that AI company. At every AI company.
Workplace monitoring was already draconian...
/s
Either way, there goes the false flag and the reason for companies to stop hiring humans over this espionage.
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...
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.