A Saudi engineer employed by OpenAI has been arrested after allegedly hiding a recording device in the artificial intelligence company’s executive conference room to capture highly confidential meetings.

Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, was arrested on Friday and charged with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications, the US Department of Justice said Tuesday.

OpenAI executives said the company’s technical surveillance countermeasures team discovered the device during a security sweep on September 30. It was plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in a conference room at one of OpenAI’s San Francisco offices.

According to a criminal complaint, the device had been concealed in toilet paper and was installed around September 28.

Prosecutors said surveillance footage showed Alfozan near the conference room several times before the device was found, despite the fact that he was not authorized to enter the room or attend meetings there.

The meetings held in the room often covered sensitive technical, commercial and strategic matters, including proprietary research, product development plans and OpenAI’s engagements with government agencies, prosecutors said.

The alleged motive remains unclear. However, US Attorney Craig Missakian said federal officials are treating the case as “a matter of national security” as the United States competes with China for leadership in artificial intelligence.

Before the device was discovered, Alfozan allegedly used a productivity tool to seek information about OpenAI’s building addresses, meeting rooms, room capacities and calendars. He also queried the locations of company executives and meetings with outside partners, according to the criminal complaint.

Prosecutors further allege that a chatbot account linked to Alfozan’s wife shared identifiers with his account and submitted prompts between September 24 and September 30 about building, installing, concealing and remotely accessing a recording device.

The prompts reportedly included requests for information on how to “build a continuous audio recorder” and “encrypt the SD card.”

On September 27 and 28, the account also asked about the specific device later discovered, including its unique MAC address, the complaint alleges.

After OpenAI employees found the device on September 30, the company said they used its own AI models to identify what it was and trace its origin.

On October 5, surveillance footage allegedly captured Alfozan entering the conference room and appearing to look behind the television where the recording device had been installed.

That day, he also allegedly left a bag unattended in another room at OpenAI’s headquarters. When security staff opened it, they found his wallet and identification, along with a second recording device similar to the first.

OpenAI executives now say they have evidence suggesting Alfozan intended to place additional recording devices in sensitive areas to secretly capture more meetings.

In a statement, company officials described the device as “sophisticated.” They said it was built to avoid detection and included advanced encryption, audio-monitoring capabilities and a mechanism for transferring data discreetly.

Alfozan had worked as an engineer for the company’s product team, and was first hired in July 2025.

OpenAI said it has since coordinated the timing of Alfozan’s termination with the FBI to avoid disrupting the investigation, and he was officially fired on Friday, the same day that he was arrested.

But executives at the company had already started restricting his access to systems and spaces following the discovery of the recording device, then suspended his physical and network access, placed him on leave and secured his company-issued equipment. 

‘At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data,’ the company noted as it vowed to continue to support federal authorities in their investigation.

It also noted that it treats protecting its technology, data and people ‘as a matter of national importance,’ and thanked the agents and prosecutors who ‘moved quickly to make an arrest.’

Alfozan had earlier been featured in a video touting him as the only Saudi employee at OpenAI.

‘Honestly, this one year felt like five years anywhere else,’ he said of his experience in the YouTube video.

Prior to joining the artificial intelligence giant, Alfozan was a founding engineer at Nash, an AI infrastructure company for logistics, from 2022 through August 2025, according to his LinkedIn page.

He also worked as a senior systems engineer at Meta from 2017 to 2022.

Alfozan’s earlier experiences include a stint as a systems engineer at Reach Labs, a wireless power startup, and internships at Microsoft, SAP in Berlin and Akamai Technologies.

He had obtained his master’s degree in data science from UC Berkeley in 2025 and had previously attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Alfozan is now scheduled to appear in court for a detention hearing on October 19. 

If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine followed by three years of supervised release.

In the meantime, FBI Director Kash Patel said protecting America’s AI innovation remains one of the bureau’s most important counterintelligence priorities. 

‘Protecting American SI innovation is essential to safeguarding our nation’s economic strength and national security, and the FBI views that mission as one of our highest counterintelligence priorities,’ he said in a statement, using the acronym for the Trump administration’s preferred term of ‘Super Intelligence.’

Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton added that ‘this serious situation underscores why winning the global super intelligence race is a national security prerogative – and why President Trump’s leadership in creating the Super Intelligence force is so important.’ 

In an interview recorded just days before his death, Breaking Bad actor RJ Mitte made a painful confession: he found it difficult to watch the series that had made him a household name.

Mitte, who was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at age three, said watching himself portray Walter White Jr. alongside Bryan Cranston could trigger a damaging mental “spiral” whenever he noticed a mistake. “I dwell in it,” he admitted.

Even while avoiding the show, however, Mitte acknowledged that he was still measured against one of television’s most acclaimed dramas. “I want to top Breaking Bad,” he said during the final interview, conducted on October 5.

“That’s the hardest… I set a bar for myself as a young man that is kind of unobtainable. And I tell people, it’s a long way down from the top of the mountain.”

Five days later, Mitte died by suicide at the age of 34 in Brownsville, Texas.

Friends and people close to the actor are now describing the extent of the emotional and financial strain they say he had been facing.

Sources said Mitte feared he would never match the success he achieved as a teenager and had become increasingly anxious about his future, including how he would support himself.

“RJ couldn’t continue his struggle any longer,” said one insider described as being close to the actor.

“It took its toll on him mentally. There was almost always a dark cloud hanging over him.”

The source added that members of Mitte’s inner circle had long been concerned about his wellbeing. “It was hanging over him 24/7,” they said.

Another source said Mitte’s financial problems had also affected plans to marry his fiancée, Kennedy Suarez.

“RJ was nearly broke, he had severe financial problems and was struggling to afford a nice wedding to his fiancée, and that broke his heart,” the source claimed.

His financial difficulties reportedly began during his teenage years. At about 17 or 18, after spending three years working on Breaking Bad, Mitte hired a business manager to oversee his income and tax affairs.

Mitte joined the series at 14, when it premiered in 2007, and initially earned the Screen Actors Guild minimum for the pilot. As the show became a global hit, cast salaries rose. Mitte later estimated that he earned between $3 million and $5 million from the series.

According to the account, however, his manager allegedly failed to pay the Internal Revenue Service and instead provided Mitte with forged tax documents.

The actor was later presented with a substantial IRS bill, which reportedly consumed his earnings and left him with debt that took almost 10 years to repay.

“It really ruined him,” the insider said.

Working on Breaking Bad had once provided Mitte with an escape from those pressures, sources said, particularly when he was filming alongside Cranston.

‘When he was working with Cranston in particular, it gave him a big lift. You could see it in his face. His spirit was strong,’ said our insider. 

But when the series ended in 2013, he had nowhere to escape to and for Mitte, the industry quickly became a source of frustration and angst. 

‘As soon as he finished his final episode, his downward spiral started,’ the insider said. ‘He kept saying he’d never get another role anywhere near as good.’

Indeed, in a text dated April 7, 2017, obtained by the Daily Mail, Mitte described uncomfortable encounters with casting directors.

‘When I go for a part, they sometimes tell me that it’s not a character with a disability, and I’m like why can’t the character be disabled?’ he wrote. ‘They get real uncomfortable when I say that.’

Mitte believed casting an actor with a disability could add depth to a character without requiring the entire storyline to revolve around his disability.

‘He hated auditioning and being judged,’ said the insider close to Mitte. ‘Although he was a big talent, he always felt his disability got in the way. He often thought he was getting auditions out of sympathy.’

After Breaking Bad, Mitte found himself fighting for roles in smaller productions.

Parts such as his appearance on Switched at Birth or his voice and live-action work in The Guardians of Justice gave him steady, respected acting jobs – but they aired on niche or smaller platforms compared to AMC’s prime-time juggernaut.

Much of his highest-profile work after the show was outside traditional acting entirely – serving as an ambassador for United Cerebral Palsy and pushing for better representation of disabled actors in Hollywood.

‘I can do any role, but some of [the casting agents and directors] are a******* who won’t even look at me,’ he wrote in another message in April 2017. ‘I want to put them on blast, but I won’t now.’

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As recently as July 2025, Mitte was considering a return to the spotlight via reality television, telling a friend he had softened to the idea of appearing on a show like Dancing with the Stars to challenge assumptions about what performers with cerebral palsy could do. 

Our source said: ‘He became more and more bitter about the industry. He’s been in a very dark place for a long time.’ 

Friends say part of that bitterness stemmed from money – and his belief that acting had never paid him what he believed a lifelong career should have.

‘RJ was angry he could not make enough money in acting,’ said our second insider.

‘He had started at a young age and acted his whole life, so he didn’t understand why the roles were not better. RJ wanted to be a big star. He wanted a nice house, but he never got it. He had to live modestly.’

The source believes Mitte may have earned far more had he pursued modeling.

‘He probably would have had way more money if he had just modeled,’ they said. ‘He made good money modeling for Gap and Vivienne Westwood, and he had the handsome face for it, but he wanted to act.’

Even a bright spot in his life, his relationship with fiancée Suarez, whom he proposed to in 2025, could not fully lift the cloud.

Suarez works in human resources remotely and would frequently travel with Mitte to work with him on different endeavors in his career.

He proposed in October 2025, not long after her 30th birthday. 

‘Happy birthday to my everything, you are so amazing,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe all the things we do together, you make me better and want to be better!!!’

Yet according to our first insider, the mental struggle and feelings of inadequacy soon began to take over.

‘Although he and his fiancée Kennedy were in the middle of planning their wedding, he thought she deserved someone better. He didn’t think he was good enough.

‘He’d been in and out of therapy for years. Sadly, all the treatment didn’t help in the end.’

Our other source added: ‘This kid had so many struggles. He got a bad break in life.’ 

Despite his private turmoil, Mitte managed to put on a brave face in his final days.

At his final red-carpet appearance – the premiere of his movie Talking to Strangers at Beverly Hills’ Fine Arts Theatre on September 30 – he flashed a Hollywood smile for the cameras.

Eight days before his death, he made his final public appearance alongside Breaking Bad co-star Luis Moncada, 49, at a hot air balloon festival in New Mexico.

To those watching, he seemed to be coping. But those closest to him say the struggle had never truly gone away.

In an emotional interview with TMZ on Tuesday, Moncada described his final moments with Mitte and acknowledged that he had been ‘struggling’ and ‘pulled in all kinds of directions’, though he declined to elaborate out of respect for his friend.

News of his death has left his inner circle reeling – none more so than his former on-screen father.

Cranston, 70, said he is ‘in deep despair’ after Mitte’s passing, sharing a heartbreaking Instagram tribute: ‘I’ll miss you, son.’

The actor said it was ‘especially devastating’ that Mitte ‘took his own life’, revealing that the pair had recently been texting and making plans to meet for lunch.

‘I don’t know if that lunch would have changed his future,’ Cranston lamented.

For those who loved him, the question lingers: Was there more that could have been done – or was the battle simply one he could no longer fight?

‘He’s at peace now, if that’s any consolation for Kennedy and all those who loved him,’ said the insider. 

The Daily Mail has contacted representatives for Mitte for comment. 

Bangkok is in the grip of monsoon season, with tropical heat and humidity making daily life distinctly uncomfortable.

Yet inside the cool, air-conditioned Queen Sirikit National Convention Centre, where the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is holding its annual summit, another source of discomfort is putting delegates on edge.

Officials and regulators have been warning me, one after another, that they are deeply alarmed by the all-powerful artificial intelligence tools being developed at extraordinary speed. Their fear is that these systems could ultimately trigger a crisis in the global financial system.

Britain once played an important part in the rise of AI, through companies such as DeepMind, which is now owned by Google. But the leading AI companies today are American or Chinese, leaving Britain increasingly sidelined.

At the same time, the UK economy is more exposed to the consequences of AI spiralling out of control than that of almost any other advanced nation.

Together, the City of London and Britain’s financial and professional services industries account for as much as 12 per cent of national wealth.

Any successful assault on those sectors would strike directly at the country’s economic resilience.

London is the world’s second most important financial centre, behind only Wall Street, and home to the planet’s largest foreign exchange markets. It also hosts a vast $4 trillion market in “complex interest rate derivatives”, as well as the payments infrastructure used by some of the world’s biggest banks. If even one of those networks were disabled by a rogue AI model—or by a system directed by malicious actors—the consequences could be catastrophic.

This is not a fanciful concern. In the past 12 months alone, major British brands including Jaguar Land Rover, Marks & Spencer and, most recently, online fashion retailer Asos have suffered serious damage.

Even more disturbing was this week’s extraordinary attack on several French supermarket chains, in which refrigerators reached temperatures of up to 50C (122F), causing millions of euros in damage.

Now consider what hackers or cyber-criminals equipped with AI systems such as Anthropic’s unnervingly powerful Claude Mythos might do to financial markets and infrastructure in Canary Wharf or the Square Mile—or to our bank accounts, pensions and other assets.

An attack on the payments system could leave ATMs offline, divert mortgage payments and other transfers, freeze credit cards, cancel salary payments and disrupt countless other everyday transactions.

If the clearing systems used by Britain’s High Street banks and building societies were brought down by a highly advanced, or even superintelligent, AI, millions of current and savings accounts could potentially be emptied within nanoseconds.

A strike against the London Stock Exchange could wipe out the value of shares held in personal savings and pension funds, sending markets into a devastating crash.

An AI-fuelled arms race is already gathering pace. Cybersecurity companies and other organisations are working to protect the infrastructure underpinning global finance. On the other side are rogue states such as North Korea and Iran, determined to create chaos, deepen division and steal whatever they can access.

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The IMF has warned that defending against these threats is becoming increasingly difficult because AI-enabled attacks can unfold almost instantaneously. In more than 70 per cent of reported cyber-attacks so far in 2026, the companies providing defensive software were unable to update their systems before hostile forces exploited their weaknesses.

In April, I spoke with Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey in Washington DC. Even then, he warned me about the danger that increasingly powerful AI tools posed to financial stability. His concern was both palpable and prescient.

Six months later, many of the leading minds in global finance have joined him in scrutinising AI—not only for its money-making potential, but also for the risks built into the technology.

AI can undoubtedly deliver economic benefits. I have seen at close quarters how it has strengthened the economies of chip and hardware manufacturers across Asia.

But the speed of its development – which could soon become ‘recursive’, meaning the AI models improve themselves by continually refining their own computer code – is now regarded as the primary risk facing the international economy.

That is all worrying enough. But at the same time, this potentially disastrous technology is being built on sand: specifically the mountain of debt on which the industry’s mad rush for data centres and other commercial advantage is being built.

A review by the IMF published this week is hugely critical of the ‘circular financing’ within the AI sector, in which the major players invest in each others’ companies and raise huge amounts of debt to do so.

The Fund’s regulators probed 14 major transactions agreed since 2023, involving $950billion of debt and share investment. It found them to be based on assumptions that revenues would eventually reach $1.4trillion – assumptions that are sketchy to say the least.

The truth is that the much-hyped prospects for AI have triggered a ‘gold rush’ into the biggest firms in the sector: the original ‘Magnificent Seven’ (Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Nvidia and Tesla) as well as newer AI champions such as Anthropic, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

No one can be sure that the valuations that have driven these stocks to dizzy heights are justified. A future AI ‘correction’ – a polite word for a crash – could trigger a great debt-unravelling and a global recession that will make 2008 look like a teddy bears’ picnic.

This is one of the most pressing issues facing the West. So you might have expected it to be at the forefront of government thinking. Instead, Andy Burnham has seized the moment to try, of all things, to unpick Brexit.

True, Labour’s AI minister Kanishka Narayan warned this week that a breach of UK cyber defences by AI is ‘inevitable’. But the complacency among most of our political leadership when it comes to AI is chilling.

It is critical that the plumbing of the global financial system, which London has helped to shape since the City’s ‘Big Bang’ under Mrs Thatcher and her Chancellor Nigel Lawson, now be defended against attack.

Ordinary citizens should protect themselves too. One senior regulator admitted to me that he is now stashing banknotes at home, so that he and his family will have enough cash should Britain’s banking system be shut down.

Is he right to? It’s a question I shall be asking myself on my flight home after this deeply sobering conference in the Far East.

The court was shown CT scans of Jesse Baird’s head taken after he was allegedly fatally shot.

Radiologist Dr James Raleigh said the imaging revealed extensive damage to the right temple, where a bullet was believed to have entered the skull.

He told the court the bullet appeared to have exited through the left side of Baird’s temple.

The scans also showed displaced teeth, consistent with a bullet entering through the jaw.

The court also heard detailed evidence from forensic pathologist Dr Kendall Bailey, who carried out the post-mortem examinations of Baird and Luke Davies, pictured.

Dr Bailey explained the suspected paths of the bullets and described the injuries suffered by both men.

Baird was allegedly shot through the upper part of his right shoulder, with the bullet travelling through his body before exiting beneath his chin.

The bullet missed major blood vessels and the windpipe and, on its own, was not considered inherently fatal, the court heard.

Dr Bailey described the wound as “very nasty” but said it could have been survived if Baird had received urgent medical treatment.

“A person who sustained an injury like that may be incapacitated; bony injuries are very painful,” she said.

A second bullet travelled through Baird’s head, entering on one side and exiting on the other.

Dr Bailey said she could not assess the full extent of the brain damage caused by that bullet because Baird’s brain had been “liquefied” by the time his body was examined.

She said the shot may not have caused immediate death because it did not strike the brain stem, but it would have left Baird incapacitated.

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The court heard that someone with a brain injury of that severity would not have been capable of consciously throwing a gun across a room.

Dr Bailey also testified that Davies suffered a serious neck injury and was allegedly stabbed twice in the right thigh after his death.

The thigh wounds were made with a “single-bladed instrument”. They did not bleed, which Dr Bailey said could suggest they were inflicted after death, when the heart was no longer circulating blood.

Similar sharp marks were also found on the surfboard bag that covered Davies’ body, the court heard.

Davies sustained a gunshot wound that entered just above his left eye and exited through the back of his head.

Dr Bailey said the wound may not have been instantly fatal, but Davies would have been immediately incapacitated and died soon afterwards.

His cause of death was recorded as a gunshot wound to the head, although Dr Bailey said she could not exclude the possibility that the severe neck injury also contributed.

Davies was not shot in the neck, but she said the injury would have constricted his jaw and he may have choked back blood.

No drugs were detected in his system. An alcohol analysis could not be completed.

Ballistics expert Lucas Van Der Walt took the court through the mechanics of Beau Lamare-Condon’s police-issued firearm (pictured) in detail.

Jurors were shown a replica gun that has the same dimensions as the alleged murder weapon, but cannot be fired.

Mr Van Der Walt demonstrated how to load and shoot the gun.