“When Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman appeared at an event in Silicon Valley with young Saudi tech workers in the summer of 2016, a new graduate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology was looking for guidance on whether to return to his homeland.
Prince Mohammed told the group that the better strategy was to hone skills in the U.S. before coming back to the kingdom, the young graduate, named Abdulrahman Alfozan, recalled in a recently released podcast interview.
"You learn from the source and then, God willing, bring that experience and knowledge back to the homeland," Alfozan said.
A decade later -- after stints at Meta Platforms and a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz -- Alfozan allegedly booked one-way plane tickets to Saudi Arabia from San Francisco for himself, his spouse and a family member.
Three days before he was to depart, he was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and charged with trying to record secret conversations within his latest employer, OpenAI, which fired him that day.
Federal prosecutors allege the 35-year-old Alfozan had spent weeks scoping out an executive conference room inside an OpenAI office building where top-secret meetings about industry-leading AI models and products took place. The complaint alleges Alfozan wanted to record what was being said behind those closed doors on an encrypted device wrapped in toilet paper.
"This arrest highlights our relentless efforts in partnership with the FBI to identify and prosecute those who seek to steal our technology," U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California Craig Missakian said. "For us, it is a matter of national security."
William Pernik, a lawyer representing Alfozan, said his client was charged with violating a federal recording statute, "not stealing trade secrets or working as a foreign agent," and asked for "everyone to withhold judgment until full facts become known."
Alfozan "came to this country years ago as a young person with a dream," Pernik said. "He spent years studying, working and contributing to an American technological sector that leads the world, a sector built in large part by immigrants like him."
A representative of Saudi Arabia's Embassy in Washington, D.C., declined to comment.
Alfozan grew up in an eastern province of Saudi Arabia, where his father was a lecturer at a technical college, he said in the podcast interview. Early on, he took an interest in computers, and, he said, in high school programmed custom real-estate software for his uncles.
He said his first visit to the U.S. was in 2008, to Dallas, as part of a math-olympiad program, which sparked his interest in studying abroad. In high school, he also toured U.S. universities. "I met people here and realized, 'This is a field I'd really enjoy 100%" Alfozan said in the podcast interview.
Alfozan started at Facebook in 2017 as a systems engineer, working on some of the company's most popular open-source software projects. At a 2019 conference in Amsterdam, Alfozan delivered a talk on how Facebook used an open-source tool internally to build custom software applications.
During his time in Silicon Valley, Alfozan regularly visited Saudi Arabia, he said in the podcast, and kept close ties to tech-centric communities in the region. In November 2018, he spoke at an event hosted by "Riyadh Data Geeks" on data technologies. In 2020, he delivered a talk on machine learning, video-calling in from California for a group called "PyData Riyadh."
"I've been working with various Saudi startups for years, acting as an adviser or mentor," Alfozan said in the podcast interview.
In 2020, Alfozan became a legal permanent resident in the U.S., and in 2022 joined the San Francisco-based logistics startup Nash, which connects businesses with third-party couriers. While working at Nash, Alfozan started an online program with University of California, Berkeley. He and five classmates completed a project that used AI to predict the locations and arrival times of cargo ships.
Since early 2025, Alfozan has been a venture partner at Saudi-based investment firm Raed Ventures, according to the firm's website. Another partner at the firm since that time is Prince Khalid Bin Bader Al Saud, a member of the royal family, the website says.
Alfozan joined OpenAI in July 2025, the company said. He was an engineering lead on the product team, working on an open-source tool kit that allows third-party developers to build AI agents. He committed code to the project's public GitHub repository as recently as last week. That same day, a camera placed by investigators caught what federal prosecutors said is Alfozan peering behind a television set where they claim he had placed a recording device a week earlier.” [1]
1. OpenAI Suspect Kept Ties To Saudis. Zeff, Maxwell; Ayyoub, Abeer. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 16 Oct 2026: A1.
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