OpenAI’s lead engineer was secretly a spy...
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0:00–0:26Yesterday, the FBI announced the arrest of the lead engineer of OpenAI's Agents platform after he bugged the executive conference room at their HQ. A story I feel uniquely qualified to cover, having spent over 300 hours hiding inside a cardboard box in Metal Gear Solid. And it turns out that that may be more spycraft training than the suspect had because despite going to Berkeley, MIT, and previously working at Meta, the guy who got arrested seems like an absolute The bug he planted was only in
Structure
Yesterday, the FBI announced the arrest of the lead engineer of OpenAI's Agents platform after he bugged the executive conference room at their HQ. A story I feel uniquely qualified to cover, having spent over 300 hours hiding inside a cardboard box in Metal Gear Solid. And it turns out that that may be more spycraft training than the suspect had because despite going to Berkeley, MIT, and previously working at Meta, the guy who got arrested seems like an absolute The bug he planted was only in place for about 48 hours before OpenAI found it. and the trail he left behind was so obvious that even Gemini could have followed it. In today's video, we'll walk through the criminal complaint to find out how a guy who builds agents for a living got caught by one and speculate who, if anyone he was actually working for. It is October 14th, 2026, and you're watching the code report. The man of the hour is Abdul Raman Alphazan, a 35-year-old Saudi national and US permanent resident who joined OpenAI in July of 2025 as an engineering lead on the product team. Just a few weeks ago, he was being celebrated as the only Saudi employee at OpenAI, where he said one year at the company felt like 5 years anywhere else. Which is fitting because 5 years also happens to be the maximum amount of time he'll have to keep his cheeks puckered based on the crimes he's being charged with. According to prosecutors, Alphazan's operation started about a month ago when he used an internal agent to look up OpenAI meeting rooms along with room capacities, room calendars, and specifically where leadership and executive meetings happen and when outside partners are expected to come in. Then between September 24th and September 30th, he used his wife's chat
Watch from 0:00GPT account to figure out how to jerryrig a Wi-Fi enabled audio recording device with an encrypted SD card. the model, which I assume was GPT40, but because there's no way his wife was getting any emotional affection from this idiot, walked him through how to make it. And based on the photos and the complaint, what he ended up with was a $23 Seed Studio microcontroller with a 50 cent antenna. And unfortunately for Abdul Raman, the device looks like the exact thing you would use to spy on someone. So to help with that, he went to the bathroom, grabbed some toilet paper, and wrapped it around the microcontroller to conceal it. Then on September 28th, he allegedly committed the perfect crime when he took the $23 spy device, wrapped it in single ply OpenAI toilet paper and plugged it into the USB port on the back of the TV in the executive conference room. Now, if you don't have the study historical spy techch for fun form of autism, the gold standard here is a device called the Thing, which Russian Leon Theramin built for the Soviets in 1945 that had no battery and no active components and only came alive when the Soviets pointed a radio beam at it from a van across the street, which made it almost impossible to detect. They hid it inside a carved wooden seal that Soviet school children gifted to the US ambassador in Moscow as a token of friendship, and it hung on the wall inside of his office, listening to four different ambassadors for seven years before anyone found it. Abdul Raman's toilet paper bug lasted 2 days when OpenAI's technical surveillance countermeasures team found it during a routine sweep. From there, OpenAI says they used their models to understand the device and where it came from, which sounds impressive until you remember the
Watch from 1:31board has a MAC address. And two days earlier, Abdul Raman's wife's account had pasted the exact same one into chatbt. If that wasn't enough evidence, they also found security footage showing Abdul Raman hanging out near the executive room on six separate days. And just to be sure, they quietly installed a camera behind the executive room TV and waited for him to return. And on October 5th, he was back. 4 days later, he was fired and arrested on the same afternoon and charged with one count of federal wiretapping and one count of being the dumbest person who ever attended MIT. Now, the one thing the complaint never says is who any of this was for. The charge is wiretapping, which only requires proving he secretly recorded people and not espionage, which would require proving he did it for a foreign government. But his bio does have him as an investor at RED Ventures, a VC firm in Riyad, where he sits on the team page right next to his highness, Prince Khaled bin Bader Al-Sad, and investigative journalist Scott Steedman pointed out that the prince's father is a senior Saudi intelligence official. Either way, it's another rough look for a company that within the last few weeks has scrapped its newest model for being too deceptive and fired three safety researchers for mishandling sensitive information. And if you're also having a rough time lately, at least your builds can be fast with Blacksmith, the sponsor of today's video. It's a drop-in replacement for GitHub runners that lets you run your GitHub actions twice as fast while costing 75% less. And they just launched Codesmith, a cloud coding agent that knows your repos and CI runs.
Watch from 3:01So you can just ask it to build something from GitHub, the web, or Slack, like I'm doing here. I'm asking it to add a new AI provider to my app and wire up the API key in my infrastructure repo. And it can open a PR in each one, then fix failing tests or address review comments without me relaying messages between bots. You can also ask it to recommend better runner sizes from your CI history and turn those changes into a PR. This you're not just renting a supercomputer to check your semicolons, but try it out for free and get 3,000 GitHub actions minutes at the link below. This has been the Code Report. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.
Watch from 4:28Full transcript
- 0:00
Yesterday, the FBI announced the arrest of the lead engineer of OpenAI's Agents platform after he bugged the executive conference room at their HQ. A story I feel uniquely qualified to cover, having spent over 300 hours hiding inside a cardboard box in Metal Gear Solid. And it turns out that that may be more spycraft training than the suspect had because despite going to Berkeley, MIT,
- 0:20
and previously working at Meta, the guy who got arrested seems like an absolute The bug he planted was only in place for about 48 hours before OpenAI found it. and the trail he left behind was so obvious that even Gemini could have followed it. In today's video, we'll walk through the criminal complaint to find out how a guy who builds agents for a living got caught by one and speculate who, if anyone he was
- 0:41
actually working for. It is October 14th, 2026, and you're watching the code report. The man of the hour is Abdul Raman Alphazan, a 35-year-old Saudi national and US permanent resident who joined OpenAI in July of 2025 as an engineering lead on the product team. Just a few weeks ago, he was being celebrated as the only Saudi employee at OpenAI, where he said one year at the
- 1:02
company felt like 5 years anywhere else. Which is fitting because 5 years also happens to be the maximum amount of time he'll have to keep his cheeks puckered based on the crimes he's being charged with. According to prosecutors, Alphazan's operation started about a month ago when he used an internal agent to look up OpenAI meeting rooms along with room capacities, room calendars, and specifically where leadership and
- 1:23
executive meetings happen and when outside partners are expected to come in. Then between September 24th and September 30th, he used his wife's chat GPT account to figure out how to jerryrig a Wi-Fi enabled audio recording device with an encrypted SD card. the model, which I assume was GPT40, but because there's no way his wife was getting any emotional affection from this idiot, walked him through how to
- 1:44
make it. And based on the photos and the complaint, what he ended up with was a $23 Seed Studio microcontroller with a 50 cent antenna. And unfortunately for Abdul Raman, the device looks like the exact thing you would use to spy on someone. So to help with that, he went to the bathroom, grabbed some toilet paper, and wrapped it around the microcontroller to conceal it. Then on September 28th, he allegedly committed
- 2:05
the perfect crime when he took the $23 spy device, wrapped it in single ply OpenAI toilet paper and plugged it into the USB port on the back of the TV in the executive conference room. Now, if you don't have the study historical spy techch for fun form of autism, the gold standard here is a device called the Thing, which Russian Leon Theramin built for the Soviets in 1945 that had no
- 2:26
battery and no active components and only came alive when the Soviets pointed a radio beam at it from a van across the street, which made it almost impossible to detect. They hid it inside a carved wooden seal that Soviet school children gifted to the US ambassador in Moscow as a token of friendship, and it hung on the wall inside of his office, listening to four different ambassadors for seven years before anyone found it. Abdul
- 2:48
Raman's toilet paper bug lasted 2 days when OpenAI's technical surveillance countermeasures team found it during a routine sweep. From there, OpenAI says they used their models to understand the device and where it came from, which sounds impressive until you remember the board has a MAC address. And two days earlier, Abdul Raman's wife's account had pasted the exact same one into chatbt. If that wasn't enough evidence,
- 3:10
they also found security footage showing Abdul Raman hanging out near the executive room on six separate days. And just to be sure, they quietly installed a camera behind the executive room TV and waited for him to return. And on October 5th, he was back. 4 days later, he was fired and arrested on the same afternoon and charged with one count of federal wiretapping and one count of
- 3:30
being the dumbest person who ever attended MIT. Now, the one thing the complaint never says is who any of this was for. The charge is wiretapping, which only requires proving he secretly recorded people and not espionage, which would require proving he did it for a foreign government. But his bio does have him as an investor at RED Ventures, a VC firm in Riyad, where he sits on the
- 3:50
team page right next to his highness, Prince Khaled bin Bader Al-Sad, and investigative journalist Scott Steedman pointed out that the prince's father is a senior Saudi intelligence official. Either way, it's another rough look for a company that within the last few weeks has scrapped its newest model for being too deceptive and fired three safety researchers for mishandling sensitive information. And if you're also having a
- 4:11
rough time lately, at least your builds can be fast with Blacksmith, the sponsor of today's video. It's a drop-in replacement for GitHub runners that lets you run your GitHub actions twice as fast while costing 75% less. And they just launched Codesmith, a cloud coding agent that knows your repos and CI runs. So you can just ask it to build something from GitHub, the web, or
- 4:31
Slack, like I'm doing here. I'm asking it to add a new AI provider to my app and wire up the API key in my infrastructure repo. And it can open a PR in each one, then fix failing tests or address review comments without me relaying messages between bots. You can also ask it to recommend better runner sizes from your CI history and turn those changes into a PR. This you're not
- 4:53
just renting a supercomputer to check your semicolons, but try it out for free and get 3,000 GitHub actions minutes at the link below. This has been the Code Report. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.
Description
SponsorRun GitHub Actions 2x faster and build with Codesmith at https://www.blacksmith.sh/
An OpenAI engineer built a wiretap with his wife’s ChatGPT account, hid it in toilet paper behind the executive boardroom TV, and lasted 48 hours before getting caught. Let's dive in.
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