Prosecutors have not said what Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi national, might have wanted to do with the recordings, but say he was in "frequent communication" with a member of the Saudi royal family.

• Abdulrahman Alfozan will stay jailed pre-trial, a San Francisco judge decided Monday.
• The engineer is accused of bugging a conference room at OpenAI, and he has been fired.
• Alfozan posed a risk of non-appearance, the judge said, after discussing his ties to Saudi Arabia.

A former OpenAI engineer accused of bugging the AI startup's office was denied release by a San Francisco judge on Monday, meaning he'll have to mount his defense from jail.

The Justice Department arrested Abdulrahman Alfozan on October 9 and charged him with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications. He's accused of placing a recording device behind a television in an OpenAI conference room — an FBI affidavit includes photos of the device wrapped in toilet paper, and a man they say is Alfozan peering behind the TV.

On Monday, the engineer wore a yellow surgical mask and a jail-issued orange sweatshirt to the San Francisco courthouse. Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse prodded Alfozan's legal team about the risk that he might not appear for a future court hearing.

Tse said that Alfozan's wife and son had traveled to Saudi Arabia with no plans to return, and went back and forth with Yasin about a one-way ticket that Alfozan had previously booked to the country. Tse said that Saudi Arabia and the US do not have an extradition agreement, and expressed skepticism that he had sufficient ties to the Bay Area to prevent his departure.

William Pernik, Alfozan's attorney, argued that, rather than being detained, Alfozan should be fitted with an ankle monitor, ordered to stay home, and have limits placed on his use of technology. The lawyer also said Alfozan is willing to put up "essentially all the money his family has" as bond, including a roughly $1 million investment account.

"Everything this man has, he's willing to surrender, and say, 'I'm not going anywhere,'" Pernik said.

Pernik and Nas Yasin, another of Alfozan's attorneys, cited his coming naturalization interview as evidence of his local ties.

"He was weeks away from achieving every immigrant's dream in this country," Pernik said.

Yasin told Tse that she learned Alfozan's wife had obtained a short-term visitor visa to return to the US, to help improve her husband's case for ties to the Bay Area.

Tse also asked Alfozan's legal team a slew of questions about his relationship with Saudi Arabia, including a commitment by the Saudi consulate to pay his bond and support his legal effort.

Nick Parker, an assistant US attorney, appeared for the prosecution. He argued that the threat of forfeiting a $1 million bond wouldn't be enough to convince Alfozan to return if he made it out of the US, because he might be able to earn more money in Saudi Arabia.

"There is a real threat here that once he leaves, the case is over," Tse responded.

The judge scheduled the case's next hearing for early November.

OpenAI called the recording device "sophisticated" when the arrest went public, though it said it hadn't found signs that he'd taken AI model weights, source code, or customer information. OpenAI fired Alfozan.

Alfozan's charge carries a maximum penalty of 5 years. Pernik said in a statement last week that the allegations "appear wholly out of character for him."

Alfozan, 35, has a green card that makes him a lawful permanent resident of the United States. He attended MIT, then worked at Facebook (now Meta) from 2017 to 2023. After a stint at the engineering startup Nash Technologies, Alfozan joined OpenAI in 2025.

FBI agents have already taken Alfozan's Saudi passport.

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• Prosecutors say an ex-OpenAI employee accused of planting a recording device appears to have received support from the Saudi government.
• A federal magistrate judge ruled on Monday that Abdulrahman Alfozan should remain in custody.
• Prosecutors said that Alfozan frequently communicated with a member of the Saudi Royal Family.

Federal prosecutors say that a former OpenAI employee accused of planting a recording device received "what appears to be considerable support from" the Saudi government.

Prosecutors made the disclosure in a motion to keep Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi national and former OpenAI employee, in custody pending trial. US Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse ruled on Monday that Alfozan should remain in custody.

Alfozan had been in contact as recently as October 5 with an unnamed member of the Saudi Royal Family, whom he frequently communicated with on WhatsApp over the last two years, prosecutors said.

"In May 2026, the individual told the defendant, 'Saudi needs you more then [sic] the US!' to which the defendant responded '100,"' indicating he agreed," prosecutors wrote.

The FBI arrested Alfozan on October 9. According to a criminal complaint, Alfozan planted a recording device in the back of a TV in an OpenAI conference room where sensitive discussions take place. OpenAI's security cameras caught Alfozan near the conference room on multiple occasions, despite his lack of authorization to the high-level meetings held there, prosecutors said.

"In the days surrounding the time period that the device was installed, OpenAI executives met with government officials in that very room," prosecutors wrote in a filing on Sunday. "Defendant's conduct could pose a danger to the national security of the United States."

The complaint included a photo of what prosecutors said was Alfozan peering behind the TV where the recording device was found.

In addition to his WhatsApp messaging, prosecutors wrote that an unnamed member of the Saudi military booked a flight for Alfozan's wife and son on October 11, despite an existing reservation for an October 12 flight, which prosecutors said was "paid for by the Saudi government."

Prosecutors also disclosed more information about Alfozan's alleged efforts to plant the device. According to the filing, Alfozan's iPhone had photos of "what appear to be the input/output panels on televisions and other electronic devices in various locations in OpenAI buildings."

Those locations, prosecutors wrote, included "another conference room where sensitive meetings frequently occurred."

Other files on the phone, including a note modified as recently as September 13, listed "Riyadh tasks" like "finding an apartment and a job for the defendant's wife, as well as obtaining an ID and a Saudi passport for his son," the filing said.

Another note titled "OpenAI leave" suggested that Alfozan "was planning an '[e]arly … pick up' of the devices he had installed or intended to install and then extending his planned parental 'leave to full.,'" prosecutors wrote.

As part of their reasons for requesting that the former OpenAI engineer remain in custody, prosecutors wrote that Alfozan's wife and son left the US without him and are now in Saudi Arabia. The filing also said "both of his parents and all (or all but one) of his siblings" are in Saudi Arabia.

In a separate filing, William Pernik, Alfozan's attorney, said that the former OpenAI engineer did not pose a flight risk.

"Mr. Alfozan was made aware of OpenAI finding the device per its own filings and OpenAI's public statements, approximately eight to ten days before he was arrested," Pernik wrote. "If his intention was to flee, he would have done so at that time."

Pernik said that prosecutors' previous disclosure that Alfozan had purchased a one-way ticket to Saudi Arabia lacked context.

"Seventy percent of the airline bookings in his email since January 2021 (96 of 138) were one-way tickets," Pernik wrote.

• Terence Tao, now a UCLA professor, earned his doctorate in mathematics at 20.
• The prodigy said his work is changing in the age of AI.
• With AI tools doing the legwork, math is no longer "heroic," Tao said.

AI is upending mathematics. For one top professor, the issue is just as spiritual as it is practical.

Terence Tao, a renowned professor at UCLA, said in a recent podcast appearance that the "romantic era" of math is over, thanks to AI tools capable of solving hundreds of problems with some simple prompting.

Now, he said, even leading scholars like him are reduced to sorting through reams of AI-generated proofs, instead of doing the "heroic" solving themselves.

"We are moving to an industrial era where math will become much more large-scale," Tao said in an interview this week on Numberphile, a YouTube channel dedicated to math.

"We are entering an era where exciting new things are possible, but some things are being lost," he added.

OpenAI began its brusque push into the field by solving the Navier-Stokes equation in early September, one of math's millennium problems.

The revelation that AI had cracked it caused consternation from many a math geek. Some mathematicians also expressed frustration that while the AI model might have solved the problem, it didn't show its work, leaving them with the less celebratory task of verifying it.

Then, earlier this month, OpenAI said it cracked another 700 outstanding problems. A math professor at New York University told CNBC that the company's release had derailed work by early-career mathematicians.

"We've had whole research programs wiped out on Tuesday by their dump," the professor, Tristan Buckmaster, said at the time.

In a separate brouhaha in September, OpenAI backed out of a sponsorship for a so-called AI "mathathon" — an event organized by undergraduates at Caltech, where participants were encouraged to use AI to solve equations — after complaints from a group of more senior academics.

Event organizers told Business Insider at the time that their professors were sorely out of touch with the field's trajectory.

"We look to the future, and we don't even know if there's going to be grad school open positions by the time we get to Ph.D," one organizer, Caiman Moreno-Earle, said.

Though OpenAI has said it is taking steps to ensure human academics retain their role in this new era, some researchers and professors are already forecasting their possible obsolescence.

Tao isn't as much of a doomer as some of his colleagues in the field. However, he did say in the interview that the stories math nerds tell themselves may not mean so much in the future.

"We have these sort of mythological stories," he said in reference to the tale of Sir Andrew Wiles, who famously spent seven years isolated in his attic solving a single difficult equation.

"There was something romantic about sort of the heroic age," Tao said.