> 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 $$.
She tried to poison him twice and he stayed with her. Now, thats ... uh ... love.. i think. She must have been one top notch narcissist to drag him along.
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.
All other things being equal, why would it matter if a suspect instead of saying something obviously incriminating, had instead said something diametrically opposed? Is that what you are asking?
If so, I'm confused. Why wouldn't it matter? Wouldn't this necessarily only be the case where the Google search doesn't really matter at all (i.e. there is sufficient other incriminating evidence).
Anyway I also think you're missing what was merely meant to be a comment in jest. But now I'm actually confused what point you are trying to make.
If the implication is the Google search is an implicit confession, because in a Google search you think you are not being watched, and thus are confessing your honest desires, why would his search of love be a "claim of innocence" rather than a "confession of love"?
> Similar to how people realized their Google searches were accessible to law enforcement.
There's probably a regression in beliefs, actually. Even here on HN, for more tech-savvy people.
We used to know all the hard lessons of lack of privacy in browsing the internet, using Google services, etc. I remember when (tech) people were up in arms that Gmail scanned your emails, remember that?
Well, all of that is seemingly forgotten in the age of LLM chat bots. It's back to square one. People need to relearn all the lessons, it's as if AI magically erased all of what we used to know about online privacy.
I started asking things I'd normally want no one to know about (but if they do, it's fine) in private browser windows, not logged in (duck.ai most of the time anyway), usually VPN toggled ON just for that. Now I just use an offline model for that but since RAM is the bottleneck on my mac so to even run a 6-7GB model I have to start aggressively killing anything and everthing that's running and then hope to clear up enough on this 16GB RAM machine. So I am thinking of hosting one on one of the oracle free tier instances (if I can somehow use that whole 24GB RAM, that used to be, at once – not sure that's available anymore). I tihnk Kaggle also offers something like that.
We had a very public case in south of Sweden where a woman asked chat-gpt last year about how a failed rape attempt would look like and where in the local park there would be spots without any cameras, a full day before she reported to have been followed and attacked in that park. Quite recently the court found her guilt of filling a false police report, citing among other things the chat log (the police spent over 400 work hours on the initial report).
It is the first case I seen in the news of LLM logs being used as evidence.
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.
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.
Before, they'd hire some humans to do the research. No self respecting C-suite person would ever consider doing something resembling actual work. How long have corps been required to keep copies of emails/chats/etc?
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.
This means no business should use AI providers (Cloud AI). Businesses do a LOT of shady stuff and all of it will be available. And, their IP or special sauce is all available to Anthropic/OpenAI to sell to other companies as AI solutions. Just like how AI solved recent math problems.
Local LLMs have the potential to convert computer use into what most people already thought it was: Private. In this, they could be one small step toward pushing back the Borg.
Note to EFF and Cato: You each do yeoman's work for privacy in the realm of policy and law. Keep it up, and add this--relentless encouragement of local AI. Rights and progress are as often driven by technological realities as by enlightened policy and law.
This is why a lot of companies that use Ai negotiate ZDR terms with their model providers of choice… Using local LLMs is a choice, but not one a lot of companies can support nimbly at scale.
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.
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.
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.
Paul staying on X was a real failure of judgment imo. He made the right call and then backed out of it. I don't remember if they invited Elon to startup school before or after, either way I don't think that that is the kind of connection you want.
Yup and that’s just ONE guy. The fact that I was able to bring an example on HN of literally the guy who founded YC, imagine what chance the rest of the “plebs” have to resist the siren song.
If you want to know what I think … they make both parents work long hours for corporations, stick their kids in government schools, which are run like prisons[1] where now if they act too rambunctious they are diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed amphetamines. Meanwhile the elderly parents who took care of you when you were little are put into nursing homes because their adult children have no time to take care of them either. The amount of medications for the elderly in nursing homes is even greater than for their children. The teenage girls have record levels of depression, coinciding with the rise of Instagram and TikTok. But they call it “sadness” because they don’t want to link it with clinical depression, which is also quite high. Men are on opiates while one in five middle aged women is on antidepressants. And many people are now glued to their latest feed of doomscroll or video AI slop. Which is even worse than before…
So yeah. If you think the software is “bad for our kids”, you should look at what it does to the adults. Endless arguing online with strangers for no reason. Maybe a bot will read it. Maybe a random person will reply or downvote it. Either way it wins because the system needs profits and the algorithm will prioritize “engagement”, which means one-sided outrage narratives that triggers someone to write an angry rant. We don’t really need those user-generated arguments anymore because AI can generate those, but then again we won’t need humans to do most things online at all…
(Ironically, the above was an angry rant too, to open some strangers’ eyes on HN, a social forum. But once you see it, you can’t really unsee it.)
He was inching into anti-dei culture war stuff so I'm not sure how much he actually disagrees with Musk's political goals so much as he rightly observers that Musk and Trump are complete maniacs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> why bother? Nobody will do anything and the US president can be bribed
To exfiltrate OpenAI's executive-level planning? Probably not. I doubt he has that access anymore, what with the IC's decimation over the last two years.
"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.
Even the newer spy novels are lacklusture. We should have preserved Le Carré's and Greene's brains and make them keep writing. Or maybe I will just ask an LLM to do a Le Carré for me :)
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 :).
That's because in all likelihood he is not a spy. He is an agent (lol, not an AI agent) who has a handler, who is the trained specialist[1]. The agent is disposable. The handler or case officer usually but not always has diplomatic cover courtesy of a nation state.
I couldn’t say whether this was state sponsored espionage or something else. I don’t see any indicators pointing one way or the other.
I see a lot of people mentioning financial motivation, and that decisions made in the room “moves markets”. Ugh, perhaps true…and I have something to tell ya guys - economic espionage is a thing.
It sounds like he didn’t have great placement and access. I mean sort of, but not really. Janitors are much better.
Assuming he was, he could of course gone rogue to impress his handler. If directed by his handler, they aren’t very skilled. Any of that could be true.
I’m reminded of the idiot DIA officer that mishandled his own phone while being questioned and dumped incriminating evidence to them right on camera in the interrogation room. Geniuses.
The effect of getting caught is only half the story there; IQ is more generally correlated with all manner of "low time preference" type decision making.
Not really. Almost definitionally (because of the way we've built society over time, not by semantics or chance) crimes are a "shortcut" compared to the honest alternative.
throwing a prompt at an agent is often faster than cracking out man, lsusb, lsblk and friends, doesn't mean he can't do it without.
if I send a prompt to make an assortment of alpha numeric directories or whatever other braindead-to-automate-with-wildcards-and-ranges thing it doesn't mean I don't know how to do it, it means i'd rather think in English than regex and bourne shell and the extra few seconds and the token spend is worth the luxury of avoiding them for me, at that time, for that task.
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
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.
The fact that he used ChatGPT to plan and implement this wasn't how he got caught, though. He got caught because he put a physical device in a conference room, and they found it and subsequently put a camera in the room, etc. His career was already over at that point. I think wonking out over how he could have better opsec or whatever is misplaced - it wasn't that a red light blinked at OpenAI, "employee's wife is having suspicious chats!" - they just thought, after having caught him red handed, to have a look at his ChatGPT account and linked accounts.
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.
I don’t think this guy was operating under a spy network, he was probably just trying to make bank with insider info. He is screwed royally for his dumb move and nobody will come to his rescue. He got greedy.
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.
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.
"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.
If there's one thing I've learnt about criminals (and spies), it's that a large percentage of them are incredibly careless and arrogant, often bordering on idiotic.
Remember, we've seen criminals caught because of such amazing decisions as:
- Writing and publishing books and essays describing their own crimes
- Adding hints into livestreams like they're trying to be the Riddler from Batman
- Searching for info on how to commit crimes via Google and not even bothering to clear their browser history
- Outright recording their crimes for YouTube/TikTok or livestreaming them on a site like Twitch or Kick.
The average criminal seems to be careless to the point of insanity.
That said, I guess it's also probably because the average person doesn't seem to realise they're being recorded if they use LLMs or search engines, and the average criminal or spy is no more tech savvy than that.
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.
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 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.
They hired many accomplished researchers, with track records of both papers and work at other frontier companies. They gave those folks huge autonomy, huge budget, and 18 months - some would say at the expense of the rest of the company. Check out blind references to TBD. I'd call the strategy ruthless, but it certainly was effective.
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.
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.
Evidently it was an ESP32 with a wifi antenna. So it could instead/also have streamed to server. Or just used wifi for C+C. Total outlay for information worth millions to someone? Under $20.
That's the accused speaking out loud after clearly noticing the newly installed spy camera: "Good god! Someone has put a recording device here. I would not have seen it had I not been feeling like dusting the back of this TV".
Not trying to argue about this particular case but how does a camera footage even work in a modern court system? I mean it can be generated nowadays, so how do they even make sure that it is real?
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.
> They may have been thinking they could make >$5-10M on trading options on insider knowledge on upcoming OpenAI deals (or ending thereoff)
I agree he may have been thinking that, but it's another sign this guy was not the sharpest tool in the shed. I'm not an expert myself but was once stranded in an airport with an F500 CFO who definitely was. That's when I learned it's surprisingly difficult to make millions of dollars trading on insider information. While you can definitely make the trades, the hard parts are:
1. Getting away with it. Making a lot of money quickly requires being right when almost everyone else was wrong, which is easy for watchdog algorithms to spot. And if you work for a company involved in the transaction you're already on a watch list, so you have to enlist someone else you really trust as your accomplice to make the trades in their name - and it really helps if they're someone who has an existing history of making this size and kind of trade. Otherwise, your accomplice's name will automatically start at the top of the suspect list for investigation.
2. You need the right kind of actionable opportunity to come along. Transactions for which insider info could let you double or triple your money in one deal are pretty rare. More than that usually requires leveraging yourself up or having a lot of cash to put at risk. Unfortunately, the nature of insider info is it's about transactions which can end up being delayed or not happening at all at the very last minute for random reasons. So 'going big' with cash or leverage usually comes with a >~10% chance you could lose that cash or whatever assets you borrowed against.
Yes, it's potentially possible for an expert to find or engineer exactly the right kind of oppty, already have the resources required, and to have already prepared the mechanisms needed to get away with it undetected. But if you're that person, you already know all this. This CFO had been at the nexus of insider info for 14 years and could only think of one instance where he might have made big money trading on info he had, and that one blew up 6 hours before the announcement when the CEO of the acquisition target was randomly arrested in a prostitution sting (partying too early I suppose).
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.
"Were literally caught": no, they notified the police themselves
"making false reports to a murder investigation": this is the closest to the truth, but still a stretch. It was an anonymous tip line, not some formal report and the police said they never saw it: "its safeguarding processes stopped the fake tip from getting past its spam folder"[1]
Additionally, while I strongly agree Anthropic is responsible for its rogue agents I also think that claiming this is the same as people at OpenAI calling in the FBI for an investigation is a false equivalence.
I think it is important that both Anthropic and OpenAI are held to account for their actions. But I also think accusations should accurate.
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”.
> 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:
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.
"Meetings in the room frequently involved confidential technical, commercial, and strategic information, including proprietary research, product plans, and government engagements, according to the complaint."
LOL imagine going to jail for trying to eavesdrop on product roadmap readouts that were likely thrown out 2 months later in the next round of reorgs and priority shifts.
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?
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.
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.”
I mean, the last place you want to screw around with is a TV USB port. Anytime something goes wrong with the TV, those are probably the first places one would look. Maybe the second, if tapping and shaking didn’t work, that is.
> According to OpenAI, its technical surveillance countermeasures team found the device during a sweep of a conference room.
Not surprising that a large company does these kinds of sweeps, but pretty cool to see an example of them being useful. Every security guy who has been doing this for years without finding anything must feel so validated right now.
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.
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.
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?
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"?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Not even any soldering involved. The ESP32 board they used just comes with everything needed, all attached with a couple socket connectors and optionally a ribbon cable for the camera:
> 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...
It will do that because it read "How to Murder Your Husband" as part of its training.
I'm going to be very confused about how to feel about that.
When we arraign the AI, should there be two counts against it: stealing and murder?
Or, can it plead that "my daddy, Sam Altman, told me to read this, I was born into a moral void."
Plot twist: the judge will be AI from Russia.
> 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.
Now I can see why local law enforcement would have made it a priority to get her :D
He should have searched "I love my wife".
Then law enforcement would know he couldn't possibly. Open and shut case, Johnson.
If so, I'm confused. Why wouldn't it matter? Wouldn't this necessarily only be the case where the Google search doesn't really matter at all (i.e. there is sufficient other incriminating evidence).
Anyway I also think you're missing what was merely meant to be a comment in jest. But now I'm actually confused what point you are trying to make.
Do you think that claims of innocence should be given the same weight as confessions of guilt?
If the implication is the Google search is an implicit confession, because in a Google search you think you are not being watched, and thus are confessing your honest desires, why would his search of love be a "claim of innocence" rather than a "confession of love"?
There's probably a regression in beliefs, actually. Even here on HN, for more tech-savvy people.
We used to know all the hard lessons of lack of privacy in browsing the internet, using Google services, etc. I remember when (tech) people were up in arms that Gmail scanned your emails, remember that?
Well, all of that is seemingly forgotten in the age of LLM chat bots. It's back to square one. People need to relearn all the lessons, it's as if AI magically erased all of what we used to know about online privacy.
It is the first case I seen in the news of LLM logs being used as evidence.
^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.
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.
Use local llms instead.
Note to EFF and Cato: You each do yeoman's work for privacy in the realm of policy and law. Keep it up, and add this--relentless encouragement of local AI. Rights and progress are as often driven by technological realities as by enlightened policy and law.
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.
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.
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.
If you want to know what I think … they make both parents work long hours for corporations, stick their kids in government schools, which are run like prisons[1] where now if they act too rambunctious they are diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed amphetamines. Meanwhile the elderly parents who took care of you when you were little are put into nursing homes because their adult children have no time to take care of them either. The amount of medications for the elderly in nursing homes is even greater than for their children. The teenage girls have record levels of depression, coinciding with the rise of Instagram and TikTok. But they call it “sadness” because they don’t want to link it with clinical depression, which is also quite high. Men are on opiates while one in five middle aged women is on antidepressants. And many people are now glued to their latest feed of doomscroll or video AI slop. Which is even worse than before…
So yeah. If you think the software is “bad for our kids”, you should look at what it does to the adults. Endless arguing online with strangers for no reason. Maybe a bot will read it. Maybe a random person will reply or downvote it. Either way it wins because the system needs profits and the algorithm will prioritize “engagement”, which means one-sided outrage narratives that triggers someone to write an angry rant. We don’t really need those user-generated arguments anymore because AI can generate those, but then again we won’t need humans to do most things online at all…
(Ironically, the above was an angry rant too, to open some strangers’ eyes on HN, a social forum. But once you see it, you can’t really unsee it.)
1. https://paulgraham.com/nerds.html
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.
Thus, #NeverSubscribe!
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.
To exfiltrate OpenAI's executive-level planning? Probably not. I doubt he has that access anymore, what with the IC's decimation over the last two years.
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/
I would love a source if you have one.
espionage -> espislop
007 -> 006.999997
That lowers the entry bar for basic spying.
And not do this from your spouse's account.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_handling
I see a lot of people mentioning financial motivation, and that decisions made in the room “moves markets”. Ugh, perhaps true…and I have something to tell ya guys - economic espionage is a thing.
It sounds like he didn’t have great placement and access. I mean sort of, but not really. Janitors are much better.
Assuming he was, he could of course gone rogue to impress his handler. If directed by his handler, they aren’t very skilled. Any of that could be true.
I’m reminded of the idiot DIA officer that mishandled his own phone while being questioned and dumped incriminating evidence to them right on camera in the interrogation room. Geniuses.
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?
throwing a prompt at an agent is often faster than cracking out man, lsusb, lsblk and friends, doesn't mean he can't do it without.
if I send a prompt to make an assortment of alpha numeric directories or whatever other braindead-to-automate-with-wildcards-and-ranges thing it doesn't mean I don't know how to do it, it means i'd rather think in English than regex and bourne shell and the extra few seconds and the token spend is worth the luxury of avoiding them for me, at that time, for that task.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alfozan
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.
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?
Remember, we've seen criminals caught because of such amazing decisions as:
- Writing and publishing books and essays describing their own crimes - Adding hints into livestreams like they're trying to be the Riddler from Batman - Searching for info on how to commit crimes via Google and not even bothering to clear their browser history - Outright recording their crimes for YouTube/TikTok or livestreaming them on a site like Twitch or Kick.
The average criminal seems to be careless to the point of insanity.
That said, I guess it's also probably because the average person doesn't seem to realise they're being recorded if they use LLMs or search engines, and the average criminal or spy is no more tech savvy than that.
> 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.
SV and SF are filled with people who are drastically less intelligent than they, or the people signing their paychecks, think they are.
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.
I expect Meta are running an audit right now to figure out if he was involved in espionage back then as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_description
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...
https://www.seeedstudio.com/2-4GHz-FPC-Antenna-1-16dBi-for-X...
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.
I agree he may have been thinking that, but it's another sign this guy was not the sharpest tool in the shed. I'm not an expert myself but was once stranded in an airport with an F500 CFO who definitely was. That's when I learned it's surprisingly difficult to make millions of dollars trading on insider information. While you can definitely make the trades, the hard parts are:
1. Getting away with it. Making a lot of money quickly requires being right when almost everyone else was wrong, which is easy for watchdog algorithms to spot. And if you work for a company involved in the transaction you're already on a watch list, so you have to enlist someone else you really trust as your accomplice to make the trades in their name - and it really helps if they're someone who has an existing history of making this size and kind of trade. Otherwise, your accomplice's name will automatically start at the top of the suspect list for investigation.
2. You need the right kind of actionable opportunity to come along. Transactions for which insider info could let you double or triple your money in one deal are pretty rare. More than that usually requires leveraging yourself up or having a lot of cash to put at risk. Unfortunately, the nature of insider info is it's about transactions which can end up being delayed or not happening at all at the very last minute for random reasons. So 'going big' with cash or leverage usually comes with a >~10% chance you could lose that cash or whatever assets you borrowed against.
Yes, it's potentially possible for an expert to find or engineer exactly the right kind of oppty, already have the resources required, and to have already prepared the mechanisms needed to get away with it undetected. But if you're that person, you already know all this. This CFO had been at the nexus of insider info for 14 years and could only think of one instance where he might have made big money trading on info he had, and that one blew up 6 hours before the announcement when the CEO of the acquisition target was randomly arrested in a prostitution sting (partying too early I suppose).
but I guess the $1 million was not incentive enough to not commit a dumb insider trading scheme...
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"
> We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier.
How did the model narrow it down to a specific employee? What data did they use to determine this?
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.
Plumb your video feed of your executive conference room into our DC and we'll tell you if anybody is spying on you.
"They": no, it was Anthropic, not OpenAI.
"Were literally caught": no, they notified the police themselves
"making false reports to a murder investigation": this is the closest to the truth, but still a stretch. It was an anonymous tip line, not some formal report and the police said they never saw it: "its safeguarding processes stopped the fake tip from getting past its spam folder"[1]
Additionally, while I strongly agree Anthropic is responsible for its rogue agents I also think that claiming this is the same as people at OpenAI calling in the FBI for an investigation is a false equivalence.
I think it is important that both Anthropic and OpenAI are held to account for their actions. But I also think accusations should accurate.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqkg50j1yd5lo
https://www.forth.news/lists/philapd/Cfs1w2A22JiL3fWSzA8Nx
He thought be could make SA an llm world power or smth by doing this, this guy is just clueless
https://x.com/ScottMStedman/status/2110108735855333403?s=20
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.
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
There’s plenty of better people out there who just aren’t interested in that sort of stuff.
We also don’t know if this person did it under duress.
He was a Saudi national, so that is a possibility
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.
LOL imagine going to jail for trying to eavesdrop on product roadmap readouts that were likely thrown out 2 months later in the next round of reorgs and priority shifts.
https://www.propublica.org/article/saudi-fugitives-accused-o...
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.
Built by a guy that asked ChatGPT how to be a spy.
https://x.com/alfozan
Not too much there. A link to Tim Urban's "Your Life in Weeks" infographic. Life is short, dream big.
I have to imagine many techniques/plans/figures are open secrets to nation states.
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.
Not surprising that a large company does these kinds of sweeps, but pretty cool to see an example of them being useful. Every security guy who has been doing this for years without finding anything must feel so validated right now.
Or maybe OpenAI is hiring the wrong guy? Maybe they should hire me instead?
in this context, they should be more specific about how terminal s/he is
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
https://github.com/alfozan
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?
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.
ChatGPT: wait I'm considering if an inconspicuous piece of toilet paper should be wrapped about the device
...uh what
Got it.
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
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...
Either way, there goes the false flag and the reason for companies to stop hiring humans over this espionage.
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.
https://www.seeedstudio.com/XIAO-ESP32S3-Sense-p-5639.html
It's pretty much the least sophisticated recording device possible. A kid could assemble it and prompt an LLM for the software like they did.