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dustfinger 19 minutes ago [-]
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?
Step 1. Find bug, maybe mess with it to make owner come back
Step 2. Place trail camera behind bug
Step 3. Record faces that look at bug
simonw 1 hours ago [-]
These are not very smart spies:
> 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.
adamm255 1 hours ago [-]
Learning that every thought you’ve put into an LLM, is recorded and readily available for evidence is going to be interesting for a lot of people.
Jcampuzano2 2 minutes ago [-]
At this points its an IQ test. Stupid people still google exactly what heinous stuff they plan to do and think thats gonna fly.
binlog 44 minutes ago [-]
Similar to how people realized their Google searches were accessible to law enforcement.
“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?”
godwinson__4-8 7 minutes ago [-]
Yes, what an idiot.
He should have searched "I love my wife".
Then law enforcement would know he couldn't possibly. Open and shut case, Johnson.
darepublic 27 minutes ago [-]
I figured any hire at openai would know that at least
thatsabadlook 59 seconds ago [-]
A good chunk of what keeps openai and similar companies afloat is subpar people who are willing to just do crappy stuff to other people. A lot of the world works this way actually.
KellyCriterion 50 minutes ago [-]
It starts far before that:
Ive seen people going through Plaud.AI conversation to find "on day X person Y said Z to person W", just to get some amunition against them.
andrewinardeer 34 minutes ago [-]
Isn't this standard C level behaviour?
KellyCriterion 1 minutes ago [-]
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.
SoftTalker 9 minutes ago [-]
Same goes for anything you've put into social media, chat apps, or email for at least the last decade or two.
reactordev 7 minutes ago [-]
And anything you put in your phone for the last decade as well
serial_dev 18 minutes ago [-]
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.
57 minutes ago [-]
10xDev 50 minutes ago [-]
I think people have some awareness, but like search history they believe deleting will resolve that (it won't).
SoftTalker 3 minutes ago [-]
Yeah if you're logged in to a Google account when you search, clearing your local browser history does nothing.
EGreg 50 minutes ago [-]
Ever since social media, I have always gamed out what would happen if this was ever saved on the backend and used against me in the future.
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.
jacquesm 44 minutes ago [-]
> And it does force you into some difficult choices.
I gots to know...
teiferer 43 minutes ago [-]
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.
teiferer 49 minutes ago [-]
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.
areoform 45 minutes ago [-]
How far have we fallen? Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things.
Toilet paper, ESP-32 and Claude "make me a bug please"? Excuse me? How far have we fallen from grace?
JumpCrisscross 38 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
Tadpole9181 10 minutes ago [-]
I mean, why bother? Nobody will do anything and the US president can be bribed or flattered to say whatever you want later.
aprilthird2021 22 minutes ago [-]
Umm, excuse me, according to the President of the United States, he wasn't a very good guy and a lot of people really didn't like him, so you should really just let that whole incident go
pennomi 42 minutes ago [-]
Surely this is because good spies don’t make the news.
xupybd 24 minutes ago [-]
Unless everyone's pagers start exploding
6 minutes ago [-]
tdeck 31 minutes ago [-]
LLMs have democratized espionage!
kennywinker 8 minutes ago [-]
Are we going to go with slopspionage, or espislop?
epolanski 23 minutes ago [-]
Counter spying has gotten sloppy and mostly digital/remote.
That lowers the entry bar for basic spying.
TeMPOraL 33 minutes ago [-]
That's what you get when you make a dumb prompt and accept the first result LLM gives you. You have to push it to think out of the box, get into the realm of insane but plausible projects :).
And not do this from your spouse's account.
kennywinker 7 minutes ago [-]
You are an expert spy. How do I bug my workplace? Make no mistakes.
fortran77 24 minutes ago [-]
Not only that, they had Leon Theremin design some of their bugs! That's classy.
What portion of grand conspiracies do we think go undetected forever? Do we have any reasons for our intuitions?
pianopatrick 15 minutes ago [-]
There likely are other, smarter and more careful spies at these AI companies who have not been caught...
These AI companies are likely targets of multiple foreign intelligence agencies, similar to military contractors.
hoppp 27 minutes ago [-]
The listening device was concealed with toilet paper behind a tv.
Duh, Not smart at all.
keybrd-intrrpt 22 minutes ago [-]
Right?!
It could have just been a regular black usb stick an I bet nobody would have questioned it.
Instead "why is there something in toilet paper behind the TV?"
serial_dev 13 minutes ago [-]
If I saw a usb stick looking thing in a conference room, chances of me giving a f: 2%
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%
39 minutes ago [-]
jonplackett 26 minutes ago [-]
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.
Topfi 24 minutes ago [-]
Somehow is an engineer at OpenAI and before that at Meta.
Does not understand how models or data retention works.
Needs LLMs to encrypt a flash card.
Are their hiring standards that lax?
RobRivera 8 minutes ago [-]
Arrogance is a help of a drug
andai 54 minutes ago [-]
Hey ChatGPT, how do I do opsec? (Asking for a friend)
compass_copium 10 minutes ago [-]
SWIM wants to bug my company's boardroom...
solyin 53 minutes ago [-]
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.
afavour 38 minutes ago [-]
> the truth is, these are not very bright guys and things got out of hand
22 minutes ago [-]
36 minutes ago [-]
United857 50 minutes ago [-]
Also from the article:
> 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…
ReptileMan 59 minutes ago [-]
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.
kalkin 51 minutes ago [-]
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.
nilamo 47 minutes ago [-]
Or, at the very, very least, use incognito mode on a computer you don't otherwise touch, such as at a library.
contingencies 49 minutes ago [-]
The future is already here it's just not evenly distributed.
icedchai 23 minutes ago [-]
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.
sippingabonedry 29 minutes ago [-]
The tech industry has a lot of very capable people with very narrow domain knowledge.
Somehow they think this gives them superpowers when it's built atop a tower of borderline retardation.
Remember the Apple guy a minute ago that arrogantly thought he could bypass their security?
TZubiri 1 hours ago [-]
"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.
msdz 58 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
MisterMunchkin 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah he should have just stuck a post it note with the words “do not remove” and nobody would have noticed
natpalmer1776 56 minutes ago [-]
IT would have noticed next time they had to plug something into the TV. Whether they cared enough to figure out what it was is a different story.
_--__--__ 15 minutes ago [-]
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
afavour 36 minutes ago [-]
> And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.
What, we’re supposed to vet everyone we network with at orgies now?
AaronAPU 50 minutes ago [-]
Further evidence the hiring process is orthogonal to competence.
cm2187 54 minutes ago [-]
I also wonder what this guy was paid by those AI labs...
fortran77 22 minutes ago [-]
It it was _used_ toilet paper, nobody would have touched it.
ajross 1 hours ago [-]
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.
TZubiri 60 minutes ago [-]
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.
ajross 49 minutes ago [-]
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.
IncreasePosts 54 minutes ago [-]
He should have just left a tape recorder running inside a briefcase that was "forgotten" in the conference room
mlmonkey 43 minutes ago [-]
Did you not read the article? He did that also!
kevdoran 12 minutes ago [-]
these are not spies lol
simonw 1 hours ago [-]
This guy previously worked at Meta from 2017 to 2022 on Data Infrastructure projects.
I expect Meta are running an audit right now to figure out if he was involved in espionage back then as well.
talon8635 53 minutes ago [-]
Or maybe he’s reporting to meta?
redanddead 40 minutes ago [-]
How did they get Wonder up the benchmarks so fast? Llama was a mess
ipsum2 1 minutes ago [-]
They hired (poached) a bunch of the top talent from OpenAI and other places. It's really not a secret.
loeg 20 minutes ago [-]
Seems possible there is some chance Alexandr knows what he's doing.
wmf 24 minutes ago [-]
A new team, probably focused on better data.
mrandish 41 minutes ago [-]
> "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.
dist-epoch 36 seconds ago [-]
1. You could get trading material though - hear about the next AMD/Broadcom/whatever deal and buy options in advance
clueless 38 minutes ago [-]
> incentive to not get fired / hard to recruit as an internal mole
but I guess the $1 million was not incentive enough to not commit a dumb insider trading scheme...
binlog 32 minutes ago [-]
1. Research is not the only espionage target. High level discussions - future launch decisions, major deals signed with other companies, relationships with governments - are all very valuable.
2. An operation can be state-sponsored and still amateurish/botched. We have seen plenty of examples of these. Remember a certain bone saw?
3. The incentive can be a lot more than financial. Plenty of governments are very…persuasive.
dmbche 21 minutes ago [-]
I'm out of the loop, what bone saw are we talking?
> We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from [...]
I'll be the first one to admit, that got a hearty laugh out of me. Never miss an opportunity to market your models I guess.
jonplackett 25 minutes ago [-]
It would be funnier in a way if this is true and that all they do there now is ‘ask the model’ about all problems.
Topfi 22 minutes ago [-]
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...
alkyon 59 seconds ago [-]
I would like to see the chatbot history.
ChatGPT: wait I'm considering if an inconspicuous looking toilet paper should be wrapped about the device
minimaxir 3 hours ago [-]
> We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from
Did OpenAI do a marketing bit in the middle of an espionage accusation?
mrandish 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
badatnames 8 minutes ago [-]
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
brrwind 50 minutes ago [-]
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?"
tdeck 2 minutes ago [-]
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?
seydor 2 hours ago [-]
"looks like a microphone"
"almost surely made in china"
KazaNLP 2 hours ago [-]
Funny. I'd bet on whatever model they used over whoever showed up from today's FBI.
jacquesm 41 minutes ago [-]
Of course they did.
Plumb your video feed of your executive conference room into our DC and we'll tell you if anybody is spying on you.
frangonf 47 minutes ago [-]
Does detective bench cancel out felony bench?
m4rtink 2 hours ago [-]
So it is some HDMI dongle & the model halucinated it into a spying device? ;-)
wildzzz 44 minutes ago [-]
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.
james_marks 8 minutes ago [-]
We don’t get news articles about the people who do it that way, though.
binlog 25 minutes ago [-]
Always be selling
tamimio 1 hours ago [-]
They are applying the “turn troubles to opportunities” very well :)
xvxvx 3 hours ago [-]
Yes. Yes they did. Which makes me question the honesty of their announcement.
orangecat 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, the classic marketing ploy of making false reports to the FBI.
MisterMunchkin 2 hours ago [-]
They were literally caught making false reports to a murder investigation
I guess I’m still wondering, because I did think this is what was being referred to but it is not a story about OpenAI.
arm32 2 hours ago [-]
Can you blame one for mixing them up at this point?
SpicyLemonZest 2 hours ago [-]
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.
SpicyLemonZest 2 hours ago [-]
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”.
dfxm12 42 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, the tweet reads more like an ad then a news report.
delichon 2 hours ago [-]
Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national, was arrested Friday and charged with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications.
MBS set this up its the twitter crap all over again theyre so clumsy lmao
He thought be could make SA an llm world power or smth by doing this, this guy is just clueless
caaqil 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
throwa356262 2 hours ago [-]
Part of the evidence was his wife's chatgpt logs.
Remember kids, uncle Sam can see anything you tell your AI and will use that against you.
binlog 1 hours ago [-]
Man really switched to his wife’s account and thought no one would be able to track him there. Calling this amateur would be an insult to amateurs.
redox99 1 hours ago [-]
How does someone this dumb get hired at openai?
ramraj07 1 hours ago [-]
Smart people can do dumb things. Their LinkedIn profile looks typical for an OpenAI engineer.
We also don’t know if this person did it under duress.
robotnikman 1 hours ago [-]
>We also don’t know if this person did it under duress.
He was a Saudi national, so that is a possibility
schiffern 1 hours ago [-]
>how does someone this dumb get hired
Using AI to pass the interview of course! I wish I was joking...
It's AI inbreeding all the way down.
binlog 9 minutes ago [-]
Technical skill and common sense/street smarts are usually inversely proportional.
10xDev 1 hours ago [-]
50% is looking and sounding the part, the other 50% is having a good university on your resume / good networking.
sdcfgy 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah that. After three bad experiences in a row they are no hire status.
There’s plenty of better people out there who just aren’t interested in that sort of stuff.
robotnikman 1 hours ago [-]
Probably went to a prestigious university or had connections.
0conclusive-dem 47 minutes ago [-]
i.e. rich or rich
browningstreet 50 minutes ago [-]
I could def espionage better. Does that qualify me to work at OpenAI?
1 hours ago [-]
catchnear4321 1 hours ago [-]
You might want to have a seat first if you want this explained.
nilamo 42 minutes ago [-]
It's so bad, it seems fake. He gets a little fine or something, along with a large backchannel payment, all to keep attention off of something else...
But that's crazy talk
netsharc 1 hours ago [-]
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...
godwinson__4-8 47 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
Fall in line, be a good little citizen and you have nothing to worry about.
tcdent 1 hours ago [-]
> ... 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.
schiffern 1 hours ago [-]
>submitted prompts... including its custom header and unique MAC
Sounds more like he put the exact MAC address in a prompt somewhere while setting it up.
gip 1 hours ago [-]
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.
clear-octopus 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Barrin92 1 hours ago [-]
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
Aurornis 1 hours ago [-]
True of any cloud service. If you are involved in a criminal investigation, they can get access to your data.
They can confiscate your computers, too.
This person, of all people, would know this. He really thought he’d never get caught.
ReptileMan 46 minutes ago [-]
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.
TZubiri 58 minutes ago [-]
Uncle Sam? It's the same company, the 'spy' asked an OpenAI controlled product how to spy OpenAI, no state espionage or search warrants needed.
godwinson__4-8 41 minutes ago [-]
Federal prosecutors work for OpenAI?
I actually am curious if they were able to volunteer the information to the government of their own volition, without a government subpoena first. I would think that could violate their own terms if done sloppily. Maybe different if an employee or maybe they had to invite the government to ask for them or something? In any case, the mechanism aside, the state would have asked anyway (say if he used another company's chatbot) so the fact that it's the "same company" is rather irrelevant. The evidence would have ended up in the state's hands one way or the other, and I would think a search warrant in this case would have been rather routine. Search warrants are infamously not a high bar to climb in most jurisdictions, as often the presiding judges tend to default to deferring to the state.
IncreasePosts 60 minutes ago [-]
Presumably they already knew who it was, if they were able to look at his wife's chat logs
catchnear4321 1 hours ago [-]
Uno reverse card - you can send Uncle Sam whatever you care to. No need to specify an address.
exe34 51 minutes ago [-]
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.
ReptileMan 44 minutes ago [-]
Google email search is the service for me. Or search in facebook and instagram chat logs.
BeetleB 1 hours ago [-]
Chances are he'll escape back home before the trial:
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.
int32_64 3 hours ago [-]
Between this and the Ledger implants I wonder if AI companies will have a supply chain risk in the future where their models get exfiltrated over 5G.
Good time to start a company that builds giant Faraday cages over data centers.
jacquesm 38 minutes ago [-]
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.
[1] /s just in case...
0xCMP 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
jacquesm 13 minutes ago [-]
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?
pjc50 1 hours ago [-]
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.
IncreasePosts 56 minutes ago [-]
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
pianopatrick 1 hours ago [-]
Would be better to build the data centers under water than to build giant faraday cages.
Free cooling, safe from missile attack, and safe from some types of electronic spying.
Still a significantly less dumb idea than space data centers.
paimapi 1 hours ago [-]
I'm imagining a certified scuba diver rubbing their wetsuitted hands gleefully as they dictated that comment
pianopatrick 40 minutes ago [-]
I imagine that you could design an underwater data center like a submarine. I.e. It could be brought to the surface for maintenance.
iAMkenough 2 hours ago [-]
From the makers of The Iron Dome, now introducing The Copper Dome
morkalork 1 hours ago [-]
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?
vostrocity 2 hours ago [-]
How did they get that capture of Alfozan looking behind the TV? Does OpenAI install its own surveillance cameras behind TVs to prevent espionage?
Aboutplants 2 hours ago [-]
I imagine they found the device and then planted a camera to catch whomever came back to get the original device
vostrocity 2 hours ago [-]
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.
jacquesm 36 minutes ago [-]
Now with extra-wide stereo audio feed, just in case they muble to themselves while doing their thing.
paimapi 1 hours ago [-]
I'm sure employers will never use in-office surveillance monitoring for anything that resembles algorithmic labor management and exploitation
Certainly they would be transparent and very ethical with something like that
mohamedkoubaa 31 minutes ago [-]
Won't that startup just be the spy in that situation
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.”
The image was captured after the bug was found.
binlog 2 hours ago [-]
A camera behind every TV in the office would be something…
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.
vostrocity 2 hours ago [-]
That does make more sense. But if any company were to take surprising security measures, it should be the frontier labs.
vatsachak 46 minutes ago [-]
So it was not AI agents catching the perp it was a camera?
orbital-decay 36 minutes ago [-]
They just asked a chatbot to identify the device and its origins, apparently. His log was used as evidence after the fact as well.
ta93754829 14 minutes ago [-]
Of all the mistakes he made, you'd think at the most minimum he would have thought to use Claude instead of ChatGTP
nl 21 minutes ago [-]
Can anyone speculate why it was wrapped in a toilet paper roll?
That seems odd, especially since it would dampen the sound recording
ks2048 10 minutes ago [-]
I wouldn't call it a "roll". There's an image in the sfstandard.com article. It is odd. Looks more suspicious than without it.
seydor 2 hours ago [-]
> The employee was terminated.
in this context, they should be more specific about how terminal s/he is
8 minutes ago [-]
yencabulator 12 minutes ago [-]
HR formed a team -- you might say a squad -- to fire them.
netsharc 1 hours ago [-]
Sarah Connor?
ceroxylon 5 minutes ago [-]
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?
43 minutes ago [-]
VBprogrammer 53 minutes ago [-]
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.
binlog 23 minutes ago [-]
A company that catches a spy does have better security than one that has not caught any spies.
I_am_tiberius 2 hours ago [-]
You got me. I ask the obvious question: What's the "sophisticated" device?
0cf8612b2e1e 2 hours ago [-]
You can buy a voice recorder that will hold weeks of audio for tens of dollars.
Back of a TV is a decent hiding place. Wonder how they found it -was it actively transmitting?
to11mtm 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Which is just an esp32s3 based device. I assume the word “sophisticated” in openAI report is just copy paste from device description.
Imnimo 2 hours ago [-]
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?
Too often official sources posts get flagged or suppressed, but see other post here - it all is on justice.gov
newswasboring 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
nfw2 1 hours ago [-]
> It was plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room and had been concealed in toilet paper
...uh what
catchnear4321 1 hours ago [-]
seeedstudio getting some impressive pr here for those xiao boards.
chews 41 minutes ago [-]
MBS using that sweet graykey behavior to exfiltrate what they can
_DeadFred_ 2 hours ago [-]
In case you need to sweep your area a decent review of anti spy devices by project farm
>OpenAI said it has no indication that Alfozan improperly accessed or took model weights, source code, or customer data
Sounds like we know where their priorities lie, anyway.
binlog 6 minutes ago [-]
How can they even make this claim? Dude was working there for over a year. He could have taken anything.
charcircuit 2 hours ago [-]
Why make this public? Usually companies just silently terminate and pursue employees who do this.
gorgoiler 2 hours ago [-]
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)
simonw 1 hours ago [-]
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.
binlog 2 hours ago [-]
Hard to keep a DoJ/FBI investigation under wraps
2 hours ago [-]
gizmodo59 2 hours ago [-]
court records? you can't hide them
TZubiri 56 minutes ago [-]
I don't think criminal charges can be private
testfrequency 2 hours ago [-]
I’ve been wondering the same.
This isn’t uncommon, but it’s rare this info is shared in such detail publicly..possibly to make an example.
Interesting that they have a camera behind the TV, I suppose for this exact purpose.
bigwheels 9 minutes ago [-]
That is a crazy picture to have captured. If I worked at OpenAI I would assume I was being recorded and monitored at all times.
leoqa 2 hours ago [-]
They left him as an employee for the FBI to continue investigating; likely they setup cameras to get hard evidence he was tampering with them.
jeffbee 2 hours ago [-]
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.
TacticalCoder 2 hours ago [-]
> The device was concealed in toilet paper, and its contents were encrypted.
Concealing a recording device in a conference room in toilet paper is a bit strange. Do executives meet in the toilets to discuss strategic moves?
ReptileMan 1 hours ago [-]
Well ... a lot of products lately get enshittified.
We've merged that thread hither, since current article has more background.
rvz 3 hours ago [-]
So but OpenAI did it to Apple and they were caught, and now OpenAI doesn't like it when it happens to them?
Either way, there goes the false flag and the reason for companies to stop hiring humans over this espionage.
rfgplk 20 minutes ago [-]
> 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...
clustrfunk 2 hours ago [-]
There’s absolutely no way Abdulrahman did this. This was a setup.
wren6991 2 hours ago [-]
They're trying to distil OpenAI employees now. Absolutely shameless
infamouscow 58 minutes ago [-]
Distilled... into soylent?
jacquesm 36 minutes ago [-]
It's a joke riffing off the Anthropic letter that was posted yesterday.
mbgerring 19 minutes ago [-]
> We discovered a sophisticated recording device
did you though
State sponsored intelligence agencies can point a camera at an exterior window and reconstruct dialogue from the vibrations. This was a loose, hand-soldered ESP32. Settle down.
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...
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
> 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?”
He should have searched "I love my wife".
Then law enforcement would know he couldn't possibly. Open and shut case, Johnson.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White
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%
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.
Does not understand how models or data retention works.
Needs LLMs to encrypt a flash card.
Are their hiring standards that lax?
> 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…
Somehow they think this gives them superpowers when it's built atop a tower of borderline retardation.
Remember the Apple guy a minute ago that arrogantly thought he could bypass their security?
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?
What might tilt the bayesian balance in favour of political intent would be the nationality of the individual, state or religious sponsoring become hypotheses.
I expect Meta are running an audit right now to figure out if he was involved in espionage back then as well.
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.
but I guess the $1 million was not incentive enough to not commit a dumb insider trading scheme...
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.
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.
ChatGPT: wait I'm considering if an inconspicuous looking toilet paper should be wrapped about the device
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.
"almost surely made in china"
Plumb your video feed of your executive conference room into our DC and we'll tell you if anybody is spying on you.
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.
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
Remember kids, uncle Sam can see anything you tell your AI and will use that against you.
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.
There’s plenty of better people out there who just aren’t interested in that sort of stuff.
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...
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
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.
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?
The alignment people would like you worry about the model exfiltrating itself, too.
Free cooling, safe from missile attack, and safe from some types of electronic spying.
Still a significantly less dumb idea than space data centers.
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.
That seems odd, especially since it would dampen the sound recording
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
Or maybe OpenAI is hiring the wrong guy? Maybe they should hire me instead?
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.
...uh what
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1reman2waLs
Sounds like we know where their priorities lie, anyway.
(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.
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?
Either way, there goes the false flag and the reason for companies to stop hiring humans over this espionage.
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...
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.