Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Here's what we know about the man who allegedly bugged an OpenAI conference room in San Francisco The OpenAI logo is seen displayed on a cell phone in front of an image on a computer screen generated by ChatGPT's Dall-E text-to-image model, Friday, Dec. 8, 2023, in Boston. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search.

The Saudi national accused of bugging OpenAI's headquarters booked a one-way flight to Saudi Arabia before his arrest, US prosecutors have alleged. Abdulrahman Alfozan, a former OpenAI engineer, had been scheduled to fly to Saudi Arabia with his wife and another family member on October 12, prosecutors said in a court filing unsealed on Wednesday. Alfozan, 35, has been charged with "using or endeavoring to use an electronic, mechanical, or other device to intercept oral communications". The offence carries a maximum punishment of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Prosecutors disclosed the alleged flight booking to a judge on October 8 in a motion seeking to seal the criminal complaint against Alfozan, arguing he had the "means - and will have an incentive - to flee" the United States.

As AI development rapidly expands, people are replicating paid-for desktop and mobile apps with free apps, potentially changing the future of legacy software. Last week, a Reddit user named Brandon Thomas shared a project called "ArtCraft" - essentially a free rebuild of the Adobe Creative Suite, which includes programmes such as Photoshop and Adobe PDF. The recreated services have been named PhotoCraft and PdfCraft. Earlier this week, ArtCraft also released copies of the Microsoft Office suite. As with the Adobe package, ArtCraft has announced WordCraft, DeckCraft, and GridCraft, taking on Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

A Saudi national who worked as an engineer at the artificial intelligence firm OpenAI has been arrested after a listening device was found in the company's conference room, according to United States authorities. In a statement on Tuesday, the Department of Justice said that the employee, identified as a 35-year-old Saudi engineer named Abdulrahman Alfozan, had worked at the company since July 2025. Alfozan made his first court appearance on Tuesday and faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. "Protecting American [super intelligence] 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," Kash Patel, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), said in response to the arrest. The incident raises concerns about surveillance and underhanded efforts to gain an edge in the AI sector, where companies and countries have angled for an advantage.

Chatbot prompts reveal the engineer's alleged efforts to set up a covert listening device days before one was found in a meeting room used by high-level executives. An engineer at OpenAI allegedly concealed an audio recording device in a piece of toilet paper and attached it behind a monitor inside an executive conference room at one of the company's San Francisco offices, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Tuesday. Abdulrahman Alfozan, who federal prosecutors describe as a 35-year-old Saudi Arabian national and US permanent resident, allegedly spent several weeks querying an unspecified "productivity agent" and an "AI chatbot" to plan his alleged surveillance operation. He used an internal OpenAI tool to ask about meetings scheduled in the targeted conference room. He also appears to have used a chatbot account associated with his spouse to ask various technical questions about setting up a covert audio recording device, according to prosecutors and the court filing.

Three engineers put GPT, Claude, and Grok in charge of a real car. Only one of them was successful. Aditya Ramabadran, Simon Mahns, and Tobias Gessler, three AI engineers at a startup called Axiom, recently fancied In-N-Out Burger for lunch. They weren't about to drive themselves, though. Sitting in a 2024 Toyota Corolla near the Bay Area restaurant's drive-thru lane, they opened a laptop and asked OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra to take the wheel.

Test engineers stage reality, sometimes by extreme means, to make sure airplanes don't fall apart, children can't open pill bottles, and bears won't break into coolers. Even the best models are little match for the incomprehensibly dynamic complexity of the universe. A run-in with human snacks transformed Kobuk the Destroyer's mother into a "problem bear." A native of the Alaskan wilderness, the grizzly was possibly ruined by a dumpster or a cache of campsite refuse, teaching her that food was simply there for the taking--a rewarding hack for the perennial dinnertime problem. This never ends well, and it was only a matter of time before her taste for free-range chickens got her killed by a rancher. If she was the problem, the two cubs she left behind were recruited to help with the solution. The bear-resistant container was invented to arrest the inadvertent cultivation of problem bears. A new cooler or compost bin cannot be marketed as bear-resistant until bears have been given a fair chance to break into it and fail. The gold standard is set by a consortium called the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, or I.G.B.C.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Selects In My Bag Look Up Creator Playbook Say More AI at School Safety Net Versus Trending Now Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age All Series Trump's AI-powered America.gov is here. It was built by DOGE alumni and runs on Grok. On day one, it backed the 2020 election results. Chance Townsend is the General Assignments Editor at Mashable, covering tech, video games, dating apps, digital culture, and whatever else comes his way. He has a Master's in Journalism from the University of North Texas and is a proud orange cat father.

Two years after trying to sidestep mobile apps with dedicated AI hardware, Rabbit is launching OS3, a cross-platform agent that lives on the screens you already use. Jesse Lyu doesn't think the Rabbit R1 was a flop. Lyu's gadget was among the first in the gold rush to create dedicated AI hardware that acted as a virtual assistant. You could speak into the R1 and ask it to complete tasks for you--book an Uber; order food on DoorDash. After a buzzy launch at CES 2024, it earned scathing reviews.

If you see what looks like an ambulance with a set of flashing lights weaving through Tokyo traffic, it might not be rushing to save a human. GMO Internet Group is unleashing what it calls Japan's first "humanoid ambulance" on the streets of Tokyo this month. A maintenance van designed to make house calls when humanoid robots break down, the ambulance carries diagnostic equipment, spare parts, repair tools and engineers to wherever a robot has stopped working. If a robot can't be fixed at the roadside, there's a spare humanoid on board ready to be subbed in and take over on the spot. Meanwhile, the broken unit is ferried back to GMO's repair base at its Humanoid Lab in Shibuya, Tokyo.