Intelligence Scoop: Is Saudi Arabia Spying on Silicon Valley?

David McCloskey (0:03)

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Gordon Corera (0:25)

Is Saudi Arabia spying inside Silicon Valley?

And are America's tech secrets at risk? Welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Corera.

David McCloskey (0:35)

And I'm David McCloskey.

Gordon Corera (0:36)

And this time we're looking at the question of what happens when spies meet the tech bros of Silicon Valley with a pretty wild story that's just been in the news about an engineer, allegedly stealing secrets from Open AI, the company that makes ChatGPT. It's a story that involves bugging devices, toilet paper and the question of whether Saudi Arabia might be after Silicon Valley's secrets.

David McCloskey (1:02)

We'll also be telling you how to bug or really more accurately, how not to bug your employer's conference room, explaining how Silicon Valley has been targeted over the years, including with honey traps and how it's been targeted, yes, even by the French. But first, a word from our sponsors, HP.

Gordon Corera (1:27)

This episode is brought to you by HP.

David McCloskey (1:29)

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Gordon Corera (1:41)

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David McCloskey (1:52)

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Gordon Corera (1:58)

And crucially, that protection is built in at hardware level. It runs quietly in the background, blocking threats without requiring constant specialist oversight.

David McCloskey (2:08)

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Gordon Corera (2:16)

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Gordon Corera (3:59)

So David, let's get into this story of the Saudi engineer inside Open AI and what exactly happened, which led to him getting caught.

David McCloskey (4:10)

Yeah, so this former engineer in Saudi national, Abd al-Rabin Al-Fazan, is accused of planting a sophisticated audio recording device inside a conference room at Open AI's headquarters in San Francisco. Now the court filing, we have a court filing and a memo from the DOJ, the Department of Justice, claiming that Al-Fazan was in frequent communication with a member of the Saudi royal family. So kind of adds this additional twist, the prospect of Saudi state involvement in this, which we'll discuss.

FBI Director Kash Patel has even weighed in. He says that Al-Fazan allegedly put this device in his, quote, employer's executive conference room to secretly capture sensitive communications about the company's super intelligence technology, which I guess is now the new word we're using for AI.

Gordon Corera (5:03)

I was glad to see Kash Patel, friend of the pod, be accurate in not calling it artificial intelligence. But now we're supposed to all call it super intelligence. But if we get that wrong, we apologize. So that's the accusation. But let's look at how they actually found this guy. What led them to him?