Who is Abdulrahman Alfozan? The OpenAI employee the FBI arrested is also a Saudi investor

Abdulrahman Alfozan looked like the kind of person companies love to put on a slide deck. His LinkedIn page showed awards, volunteer work, a patent, degrees from two top U.S. universities, and stints at SAP, Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI. Then the FBI arrested him on Oct. 9, and the résumé turned into a mystery the internet immediately started picking apart.

Court documents identify Alfozan as a Saudi national and a legal permanent resident of the U.S. since Sept. 2020. His U.S. timeline goes back to 2011, when he enrolled at MIT. By 2025, he had also become one of 20 venture partners at RAED Ventures, a Saudi Arabia-based firm where he is still shown on the website. RAED has not said whether he still works there.

That outside role is part of what makes the case messy. OpenAI told Fortune that Alfozan joined in July 2025, while his own LinkedIn says September 2025. The company would not comment on its conflict-of-interest policy, and it did not answer a question about the date mismatch. It also said there were “no indications” he had improperly accessed or taken model weights, source code or customer data.

The federal complaint takes a narrower route. It says Alfozan is charged with using or trying to use a device to intercept oral communications. It does not accuse him of stealing trade secrets or acting for a foreign government. Prosecutors said a lawyer from the Justice Department’s National Security Division is helping with the case, and court filings also describe the case as involving a one-way trip booked for Oct. 12 from San Francisco to Saudi Arabia, via Istanbul, by Alfozan, his wife and another family member.

The alleged sequence is tightly dated. Starting Aug. 17, he is said to have asked an internal productivity tool about conference room capacity and meetings. Starting Sept. 24, he allegedly used a chatbot account linked to his wife to ask about building a continuous audio recorder, encrypting its memory card and adding live listening. OpenAI told Fortune that the chatbot was ChatGPT. The company says it found the device during a sweep on Sept. 30, alerted federal authorities, and later saw Alfozan on a camera placed behind a TV in the room on Oct. 5. He was fired on Oct. 9 and appeared in federal court on Oct. 13; he is due back on Oct. 19.