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The OpenAI employee accused of bugging the ChatGPT maker’s headquarters had a one-way ticket booked to Saudi Arabia for three days after the date of his arrest, according to a court filing.
Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi national, was arrested by the FBI on Friday after the AI lab found a cheap, Chinese-made recording device wrapped in toilet paper and inserted into the back of a television in an executive conference room.
Prosecutors said in newly unsealed court documents that Alfozan, his wife and a third family member booked a trip to Saudi Arabia for Oct. 12 without return flights.
The government cited the airline tickets last week in urging a federal judge to close the criminal complaint against Alfozan to avoid jeopardizing his pending arrest. The judge granted the request on October 8, but ordered the documents unsealed on Tuesday.
“The defendant has the means – and will be incentivized – to flee the United States sooner if he becomes aware of this matter before he is arrested,” US Justice Department lawyers wrote in their filing last week.
William Pernik, Alfozan’s attorney, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. He told the FT earlier on Wednesday that the allegations against Alfozan “seem totally irrelevant to him” and vowed to “relentlessly investigate” the government’s evidence against his client.
The FBI says Alfozan placed the bug in OpenAI’s offices around September 28, two days before it was discovered by the startup’s security team.
Alfozan was arrested by the FBI on October 9, according to the DoJ. OpenAI said it fired him the same day.
The incident highlighted long-standing concerns that major AI labs are targets of industrial espionage from foreign countries trying to access technical secrets to gain an edge in the global AI race.
OpenAI said Tuesday that there was no indication that customer data, source code or so-called model weights that determine how the systems work had been stolen.
Alfozan worked for OpenAI as an engineer since mid-2025 and has been a permanent legal resident of the United States since 2020.
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