today at 9:44 PM
These are not very smart spies:
> A chatbot account tied to Alfozanâs 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 âbuild a continuous audio recorderâ and âencrypt the SD card,â prosecutors claimed. On Sept. 27 and 28, the account asked about the specific device that was later found, including its unique MAC address.
today at 9:48 PM
Learning that every thought youâve put into an LLM, is recorded and readily available for evidence is going to be interesting for a lot of people.
today at 10:08 PM
Similar to how people realized their Google searches were accessible to law enforcement.
âI did not kill my wife!â
âCool so why did you search for how to hide a dead body the same day she went missing?â
today at 10:34 PM
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.
today at 10:25 PM
I figured any hire at openai would know that at least
today at 10:02 PM
It starts far before that:
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.
today at 10:18 PM
Isn't this standard C level behaviour?
today at 9:55 PM
today at 10:03 PM
I think people have some awareness, but like search history they believe deleting will resolve that (it won't).
today at 10:02 PM
Ever since social media, I have always gamed out what would happen if this was ever saved on the backend and used against me in the future.
Itâs like thinking about edge cases in programmingâŠ
Most people are totally not like that. And it does force you into some difficult choices.
today at 10:08 PM
> And it does force you into some difficult choices.
I gots to know...
today at 10:09 PM
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.
today at 10:03 PM
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.
today at 10:07 PM
How far have we fallen? Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things.
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?
today at 10:14 PM
> Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things
Assuming this is espionageâfor which I have seen zero evidenceâisnât Saudi Arabia notorious for having a fuckup of an intelligence operation? The literal hatchet job that was the Khashoggi murder comes to mind.
today at 10:31 PM
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
today at 10:10 PM
Surely this is because good spies donât make the news.
today at 10:28 PM
Unless everyone's pagers start exploding
today at 10:29 PM
Not only that, they had Leon Theremin design some of their bugs! That's classy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
today at 10:21 PM
LLMs have democratized espionage!
today at 10:30 PM
Counter spying has gotten sloppy and mostly digital/remote.
That lowers the entry bar for basic spying.
today at 10:19 PM
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 :).
And not do this from your spouse's account.
today at 10:28 PM
Somehow is an engineer at OpenAI and before that at Meta.
Does not understand how models or data retention works.
Needs LLMs to encrypt a flash card.
Are their hiring standards that lax?
today at 9:54 PM
You probably donât hear about the smart ones.
today at 10:00 PM
I was thinking about this, how all the secret societies and crazy conspiracies we know about are just the ones that failed to keep the lid on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White
today at 10:11 PM
What portion of grand conspiracies do we think go undetected forever? Do we have any reasons for our intuitions?
today at 10:26 PM
Itâs the criminals that you donât catch that you have to worry about.
The fact that even this incompetent dude most likely still made off with some secrets means Iâm sure some better trained ones got/are continuing to get a few more.
today at 10:13 PM
today at 10:25 PM
The listening device was concealed with toilet paper behind a tv. Duh, Not smart at all.
today at 10:30 PM
Right?!
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?"
today at 9:59 PM
Hey ChatGPT, how do I do opsec? (Asking for a friend)
today at 10:31 PM
today at 9:59 PM
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.
today at 10:15 PM
> the truth is, these are not very bright guys and things got out of hand
today at 10:16 PM
today at 10:29 PM
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.
today at 10:02 PM
Also from the article:
> An unattended bag found in the companyâs offices contained Alfozanâs wallet and identification, as well as a recording device
Itâs almost like he wanted to be caughtâŠ
today at 10:23 PM
The tech industry has a lot of very capable people with very narrow domain knowledge.
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?
today at 9:53 PM
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.
today at 10:02 PM
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.
today at 10:05 PM
Or, at the very, very least, use incognito mode on a computer you don't otherwise touch, such as at a library.
today at 10:03 PM
The future is already here it's just not evenly distributed.
today at 9:49 PM
"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.
today at 9:51 PM
Yeah he should have just stuck a post it note with the words âdo not removeâ and nobody would have noticed
today at 9:56 PM
IT would have noticed next time they had to plug something into the TV. Whether they cared enough to figure out what it was is a different story.
today at 9:54 PM
> 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.
today at 10:16 PM
> And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.
What, weâre supposed to vet everyone we network with at orgies now?
today at 10:02 PM
Further evidence the hiring process is orthogonal to competence.
today at 10:30 PM
It it was _used_ toilet paper, nobody would have touched it.
today at 9:58 PM
I also wonder what this guy was paid by those AI labs...
today at 9:58 PM
He should have just left a tape recorder running inside a briefcase that was "forgotten" in the conference room
today at 10:09 PM
Did you not read the article? He did that also!
today at 9:48 PM
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.
today at 9:53 PM
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.
today at 10:03 PM
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.
today at 10:34 PM
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?
Here is a direct link to Figure 3:
https://assets.sfstandard.com/image/994911177489/image_bfl33...
today at 9:48 PM
This guy previously worked at Meta from 2017 to 2022 on Data Infrastructure projects.
I expect Meta are running an audit right now to figure out if he was involved in espionage back then as well.
today at 10:00 PM
Or maybe heâs reporting to meta?
today at 10:12 PM
How did they get Wonder up the benchmarks so fast? Llama was a mess
today at 10:32 PM
Seems possible there is some chance Alexandr knows what he's doing.
today at 10:28 PM
A new team, probably focused on better data.
today at 10:11 PM
> "Scott Schelble, special agent in charge of the FBIâs 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.
today at 10:21 PM
1. Research is not the only espionage target. High level discussions - future launch decisions, major deals signed with other companies, relationships with governments - 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 veryâŠpersuasive.
today at 10:32 PM
I'm out of the loop, what bone saw are we talking?
today at 10:37 PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jamal_Khashog...
Not sure why OP would call it amateurish/botched.
today at 10:15 PM
> incentive to not get fired / hard to recruit as an internal mole
but I guess the $1 million was not incentive enough to not commit a dumb insider trading scheme...
today at 10:25 PM
> We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from [...]
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.
today at 10:28 PM
It would be funnier in a way if this is true and that all they do there now is âask the modelâ about all problems.
today at 10:30 PM
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...
today at 8:00 PM
> We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from
Did OpenAI do a marketing bit in the middle of an espionage accusation?
today at 9:26 PM
> 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.
today at 10:02 PM
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?"
today at 8:53 PM
"looks like a microphone"
"almost surely made in china"
today at 8:45 PM
Funny. I'd bet on whatever model they used over whoever showed up from today's FBI.
today at 10:12 PM
Of course they did.
Plumb your video feed of your executive conference room into our DC and we'll tell you if anybody is spying on you.
today at 10:06 PM
Does detective bench cancel out felony bench?
today at 10:27 PM
Always be selling
today at 9:03 PM
So it is some HDMI dongle & the model halucinated it into a spying device? ;-)
today at 10:09 PM
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.
today at 10:11 PM
Yeah, the tweet reads more like an ad then a news report.
today at 9:31 PM
They are applying the âturn troubles to opportunitiesâ very well :)
today at 8:06 PM
Yes. Yes they did. Which makes me question the honesty of their announcement.
today at 8:13 PM
Yes, the classic marketing ploy of making false reports to the FBI.
today at 8:25 PM
They were literally caught making false reports to a murder investigation
today at 8:48 PM
Wasn't that Anthropic?
https://www.forth.news/lists/philapd/Cfs1w2A22JiL3fWSzA8Nx
today at 8:30 PM
In case anybody is wondering: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqkg50j1yd5lo
today at 8:33 PM
I guess Iâm still wondering, because I did think this is what was being referred to but it is not a story about OpenAI.
today at 8:45 PM
Can you blame one for mixing them up at this point?
today at 9:08 PM
Yes? I mean, I donât think itâs a character flaw to not know things, but their rivalry is extremely notorious and relevant. Someone who can't keep them straight wonât be able to understand whatâs going on in AI.
today at 8:33 PM
It could be that the reports are accurate and the device simply wasnât as sophisticated as the statement implies. You could if you wanted use an AI model to analyze a USB camera with device name âJohn_Doe_1â.
today at 8:31 PM
Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national, was arrested Friday and charged with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications.
today at 9:21 PM
More here too: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/saudi-national-arrested-insta...
today at 9:07 PM
[flagged]
today at 9:22 PM
Part of the evidence was his wife's chatgpt logs.
Remember kids, uncle Sam can see anything you tell your AI and will use that against you.
today at 9:47 PM
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...
today at 10:05 PM
> 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
today at 10:13 PM
Fall in line, be a good little citizen and you have nothing to worry about.
today at 9:30 PM
Man really switched to his wifeâs account and thought no one would be able to track him there. Calling this amateur would be an insult to amateurs.
today at 9:35 PM
How does someone this dumb get hired at openai?
today at 9:39 PM
Smart people can do dumb things. Their LinkedIn profile looks typical for an OpenAI engineer.
We also donât know if this person did it under duress.
today at 9:48 PM
>We also donât know if this person did it under duress.
He was a Saudi national, so that is a possibility
today at 9:50 PM
>how does someone this dumb get hired
It's AI inbreeding all the way down.
today at 9:41 PM
50% is looking and sounding the part, the other 50% is having a good university on your resume / good networking.
today at 9:43 PM
Yeah that. After three bad experiences in a row they are no hire status.
Thereâs plenty of better people out there who just arenât interested in that sort of stuff.
today at 9:46 PM
Probably went to a prestigious university or had connections.
today at 10:05 PM
i.e. rich or rich
today at 10:02 PM
I could def espionage better. Does that qualify me to work at OpenAI?
today at 9:43 PM
today at 9:36 PM
You might want to have a seat first if you want this explained.
today at 10:10 PM
It's so bad, it seems fake. He gets a little fine or something, along with a large backchannel payment, all to keep attention off of something else...
But that's crazy talk
today at 9:32 PM
> ... a chatbot account associated with Alfozanâs spouse (which shared multiple identifiers and attributes with Alfozanâs 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 âbuild[ing] a continuous audio recorder,â âcustomiz[ing] Wi-Fi . . . connectivity,â âimprov[ing] audio and live listening,â and âencrypt[ing] the SD card,â 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.
today at 9:38 PM
>submitted prompts... including its custom header and unique MAC
today at 9:38 PM
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.
today at 9:36 PM
[dead]
today at 9:41 PM
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
today at 9:36 PM
True of any cloud service. If you are involved in a criminal investigation, they can get access to your data.
They can confiscate your computers, too.
This person, of all people, would know this. He really thought heâd never get caught.
today at 10:07 PM
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.
today at 9:54 PM
Uncle Sam? It's the same company, the 'spy' asked an OpenAI controlled product how to spy OpenAI, no state espionage or search warrants needed.
today at 10:11 PM
Federal prosecutors work for OpenAI?
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.
today at 9:52 PM
Presumably they already knew who it was, if they were able to look at his wife's chat logs
today at 9:35 PM
Uno reverse card - you can send Uncle Sam whatever you care to. No need to specify an address.
today at 10:01 PM
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.
today at 10:08 PM
Google email search is the service for me. Or search in facebook and instagram chat logs.
today at 10:33 PM
> We discovered a sophisticated recording device
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.
today at 9:39 PM
Chances are he'll escape back home before the trial:
https://www.propublica.org/article/saudi-fugitives-accused-o...
today at 9:05 PM
He was just gathering training data
today at 9:38 PM
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.
today at 10:31 PM
Can anyone speculate why it was wrapped in a toilet paper roll?
That seems odd, especially since it would dampen the sound recording
today at 8:18 PM
Between this and the Ledger implants I wonder if AI companies will have a supply chain risk in the future where their models get exfiltrated over 5G.
Good time to start a company that builds giant Faraday cages over data centers.
today at 10:14 PM
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, but still, you have to wonder.
today at 10:21 PM
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.
today at 9:43 PM
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.
today at 9:57 PM
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
today at 9:31 PM
Would be better to build the data centers under water than to build giant faraday cages.
Free cooling, safe from missile attack, and safe from some types of electronic spying.
today at 9:42 PM
Microsoft (Research) beat you to it: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/natick/
Still a significantly less dumb idea than space data centers.
today at 9:42 PM
I'm imagining a certified scuba diver rubbing their wetsuitted hands gleefully as they dictated that comment
today at 10:12 PM
I imagine that you could design an underwater data center like a submarine. I.e. It could be brought to the surface for maintenance.
today at 8:44 PM
From the makers of The Iron Dome, now introducing The Copper Dome
today at 9:35 PM
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?
today at 10:28 PM
Smart guy does stupid things, but why? I mean why did he, as an engineer perhaps earning north to 300k, do such a sloppy job?
Or maybe OpenAI is hiring the wrong guy? Maybe they should hire me instead?
today at 9:04 PM
How did they get that capture of Alfozan looking behind the TV? Does OpenAI install its own surveillance cameras behind TVs to prevent espionage?
today at 9:06 PM
I imagine they found the device and then planted a camera to catch whomever came back to get the original device
today at 9:09 PM
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.
today at 10:16 PM
Now with extra-wide stereo audio feed, just in case they muble to themselves while doing their thing.
today at 9:46 PM
I'm sure employers will never use in-office surveillance monitoring for anything that resembles algorithmic labor management and exploitation
Certainly they would be transparent and very ethical with something like that
today at 10:21 PM
Won't that startup just be the spy in that situation
today at 9:38 PM
> How did they get that capture of Alfozan looking behind the TV?
âOpenAI personnel found the device Sept. 3âŠOn Oct. 5, the complaint says, Alfozan entered the conference room and appeared to look behind the television.â
The image was captured after the bug was found.
today at 9:07 PM
A camera behind every TV in the office would be somethingâŠ
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.
today at 9:13 PM
That does make more sense. But if any company were to take surprising security measures, it should be the frontier labs.
today at 10:06 PM
So it was not AI agents catching the perp it was a camera?
today at 10:16 PM
They just asked a chatbot to identify the device and its origins, apparently. His log was used as evidence after the fact as well.
today at 10:31 PM
Using your wife's chatbot account and covering a device in toilet paper is not smart when spying a company.
today at 10:30 PM
today at 10:09 PM
today at 9:59 PM
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.
today at 10:29 PM
A company that catches a spy does have better security than one that has not caught any spies.
today at 8:51 PM
> The employee was terminated.
in this context, they should be more specific about how terminal s/he is
today at 9:50 PM
Sarah Connor?
today at 10:32 PM
> 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...
today at 10:10 PM
Should have used a local model...
today at 8:44 PM
You got me. I ask the obvious question: What's the "sophisticated" device?
today at 8:47 PM
You can buy a voice recorder that will hold weeks of audio for tens of dollars.
Back of a TV is a decent hiding place. Wonder how they found it -was it actively transmitting?
today at 9:03 PM
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.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
today at 8:46 PM
ESP32-S3
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
today at 9:00 PM
SeedStudio is super nice - a lot of their gear is also popular in the MeshCore community (LoRa radios combined with ESP32 or NRF MCUs).
today at 9:49 PM
[dead]
today at 8:45 PM
Apple HomeView
today at 10:31 PM
Speaking of surreptitiously installed bugs, remember to opt out of training in your Codex.
today at 9:32 PM
Sounds like fair use to me! Information wants to be free, remember?
today at 9:41 PM
Looking at the device pic in here https://sfstandard.com/2026/10/13/openai-engineer-arrested-a...
It looks like itâs 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 âsophisticatedâ in openAI report is just copy paste from device description.
today at 9:06 PM
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?
today at 9:34 PM
Too often official sources posts get flagged or suppressed, but see other post here - it all is on justice.gov
today at 9:48 PM
> 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
...uh what
today at 9:33 PM
seeedstudio getting some impressive pr here for those xiao boards.
today at 10:11 PM
MBS using that sweet graykey behavior to exfiltrate what they can
today at 10:00 PM
>OpenAI said it has no indication that Alfozan improperly accessed or took model weights, source code, or customer data
Sounds like we know where their priorities lie, anyway.
today at 9:07 PM
In case you need to sweep your area a decent review of anti spy devices by project farm
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1reman2waLs
today at 8:49 PM
Why make this public? Usually companies just silently terminate and pursue employees who do this.
today at 9:46 PM
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:
> âFor us it is a matter of national security,â 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. attorneyâs 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.
today at 8:54 PM
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 âBUG STORY LEAKED TO VALLEYWAG PUT OUT COUNTER PR GET AGEAD OF STORYâ 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)
today at 8:59 PM
Hard to keep a DoJ/FBI investigation under wraps
today at 8:53 PM
today at 8:53 PM
court records? you can't hide them
today at 9:56 PM
I don't think criminal charges can be private
today at 8:59 PM
Iâve been wondering the same.
This isnât uncommon, but itâs rare this info is shared in such detail publicly..possibly to make an example.
today at 9:40 PM
today at 8:21 PM
An iPhone? A laptop?
today at 8:50 PM
Pictures on https://sfstandard.com/2026/10/13/openai-engineer-arrested-a...
today at 8:54 PM
Interesting that they have a camera behind the TV, I suppose for this exact purpose.
today at 9:08 PM
They left him as an employee for the FBI to continue investigating; likely they setup cameras to get hard evidence he was tampering with them.
today at 8:41 PM
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.
today at 8:47 PM
> The device was concealed in toilet paper, and its contents were encrypted.
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?
today at 9:45 PM
Well ... a lot of products lately get enshittified.
today at 9:39 PM
[dead]
today at 8:33 PM
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50077703
today at 9:27 PM
We've merged that thread hither, since current article has more background.
today at 8:10 PM
So but OpenAI did it to Apple and they were caught, and now OpenAI doesn't like it when it happens to them?
Either way, there goes the false flag and the reason for companies to stop hiring humans over this espionage.
today at 8:43 PM
They're trying to distil OpenAI employees now. Absolutely shameless
today at 9:54 PM
Distilled... into soylent?
today at 10:17 PM
It's a joke riffing off the Anthropic letter that was posted yesterday.
today at 9:18 PM
Thereâs absolutely no way Abdulrahman did this. This was a setup.