A defense filing says the kingdom’s consulate will pay any bond a judge sets for Abdulrahman Alfozan, drawing a foreign government into a San Francisco case that federal officials have cast as a matter of national security.
By Staff Reporter
The government of Saudi Arabia has offered to pay the full bail for Abdulrahman Alfozan, the former OpenAI engineer charged with hiding a recording device in an executive conference room at the company’s San Francisco offices, according to a motion his lawyers filed late Friday in federal court.
The filing, which asks that Mr. Alfozan be released before trial, says the Consulate General of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia stated in an Oct. 14 letter that it “stands ready to cover the full amount of any bail bond the Court requires.” Two days later, the motion says, the consulate told federal Pretrial Services in writing that it “will not issue any travel documents” to Mr. Alfozan while he is free and “undertakes to promptly notify U.S. Pretrial Services” if he asks for one.
The offer will be before U.S. Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse at a detention hearing set for 11 a.m. Monday at the federal courthouse on Golden Gate Avenue. Saudi officials have made no public statement on the case that The Inquirer could find.
The charge and the stakes
Mr. Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national and lawful permanent resident who lives in Millbrae, was arrested on Oct. 9 on a single count of using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications, which carries a maximum of five years in prison, according to the Justice Department.
The complaint alleges that OpenAI found a thumb-sized recorder, wrapped in toilet paper and plugged into the back of a television, in an executive conference room on Sept. 30. Prosecutors say Mr. Alfozan had no authority to use the room, queried an internal tool about executive meeting locations and calendars, and was recorded on Oct. 5 appearing to check behind the television. A second, similar device was found that day in a bag he had left unattended.
The FBI director, Kash Patel, said Mr. Alfozan “allegedly concealed a covert recording device inside his employer’s executive conference room to secretly capture sensitive communications about the company’s super intelligence technology.” Craig H. Missakian, the U.S. attorney in San Francisco, said: “For us it is a matter of national security.”
Mr. Alfozan is not charged with espionage, theft of trade secrets or acting for a foreign government. OpenAI has said it has “no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data.” His lawyer, William V. Pernik, told CNBC that his client is “charged with violating a federal recording statute, not stealing trade secrets or working as a foreign agent,” adding, “Where someone was born is not evidence of anything.”
A one-way ticket, explained
Prosecutors have pointed to travel plans. In an Oct. 8 request to keep the case sealed, they said Mr. Alfozan had booked one-way tickets to Saudi Arabia, via Istanbul, for Oct. 12, and argued that he “has the means — and will have the incentive — to flee the United States sooner if he learns about this case before he is arrested,” CNBC reported.
The defense motion says the economy tickets for Mr. Alfozan, his wife and their infant son cost $1,897.59 and were bought on Sept. 13, before the device was allegedly installed. Oct. 12, the lawyers say, was the last day of a 60-day grace period for his wife after her student work authorization expired; he planned to spend his paternity leave in Riyadh and return for a Nov. 6 naturalization interview in San Francisco.
The filing says 96 of 138 airline bookings in his email since 2021 were one-way, and that he returned from all 25 foreign trips he listed from 2020 to 2025. Fifty-four people wrote in support, and he has proposed GPS monitoring, home detention and surrender of all travel documents.
A precedent on the West Coast
The consulate’s offer is meant to reassure the court, but it recalls a case well known in the Pacific Northwest. After Abdulrahman Sameer Noorah, a Saudi student, was charged in the 2016 hit-and-run death of a Portland teenager, Fallon Smart, the Saudi consulate provided $100,000 for his bail, the BBC reported. He disappeared before trial; federal authorities told The Oregonian he left on an illicit passport aboard a private plane. “The United States and Saudi Arabia do not have a bilateral extradition treaty, and Saudi Arabia does not extradite its nationals to the United States,” a State Department official wrote to Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon in 2019. The State Department later pledged a crackdown on foreign officials who help suspects evade prosecution.
Nothing in the public record links that case to Mr. Alfozan’s, and his lawyers stress that the consulate has pledged in writing not to issue him a passport. But the history may shape how the court weighs a guarantee from the government of the country prosecutors fear he could reach.
Silicon Valley’s Saudi ties
The case has also drawn attention to Saudi Arabia’s footprint in the Bay Area’s technology economy. CNBC reported that Mr. Alfozan is a venture partner at Raed Ventures, a Saudi firm one of whose funds drew money from a state-linked fund, though the complaint does not allege that Raed knew of the alleged bugging. OpenAI held talks this year with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund about an investment, CNBC reported, and Wired noted that the Trump administration last year signed a pact giving the kingdom access to advanced chips and A.I. technology.
On Friday, The Stanford Review reported that the Saudi Arabian Association at Stanford had publicly thanked Mr. Alfozan for his “generous support” and “backing” and hosted him on a panel last year. A club representative told the Review his support was “generally nonfinancial” and that it received no money from him.
Monday’s hearing will be the first public test of how much weight a federal judge in San Francisco gives to a foreign government’s word.
