OpenAI said Tuesday it had sicced the FBI on an employee who was spying. But this alleged James Bond wasn’t exactly getting his tech from Q Division.
Judging from the press materials released on Tuesday by the Justice Department, the device the accused, Abdulrahman Alfozan, is said to have used to bug a conference room at an OpenAI office in San Francisco was a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense. It’s a microphone and camera the width of your thumbnail. You can order yours today for the low low price of $13.99. In a statement earlier on Tuesday, OpenAI called the Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense a “sophisticated recording device.”
The Seeed website includes a YouTube video about making one into a DIY AI-pin, sort of like the ill-fated Humane Ai Pin.
Don’t get carried away imagining all the espionage fantasies that have suddenly become affordable. The $6.99 camera built into the Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense is 2 megapixels, which you may remember as the resolution from the first generation iPhone. Even the disembodied AI voice in the video on the Seeed website says the images it produces is blurry.
But “sophisticated” may not be an altogether inaccurate word. The suspect was apparently (and allegedly) taking advantage of the device’s 2.4GHz Wi-Fi subsystem to transmit data to some unknown second device.
According to the Justice Department:
“[…]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.”
It seems the apparent spy was also taking video the entire time, but it was just images of the back of the conference room TV it was plugged into. The FBI claims that on October 5—well into a sort of intra-company dragnet launched by OpenAI after it found the device on September 30—Alfozan entered the bugged conference room and peeked behind the TV at his Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense, inadvertently capturing this haunting selfie:
The Justice Department’s press release features a description of what Alfozan was allegedly up to, courtesy of FBI director Kash Patel that, if you read it a month ago, would have sounded like it was from a bad translation of a Heisei era Godzilla movie. Patel says the suspect allegedly put the device in his “employer’s executive conference room to secretly capture sensitive communications about the company’s super intelligence technology.”
Earlier today, OpenAI told me in an email that it used its own AI models to analyze data from the device—including forensic images of the data stored on the device—to find their suspect.
