OpenAI says it found a 'sophisticated recording device' hidden in its offices, Character.AI just filed for bankruptcy, and former foe Disney may buy it for parts, and Scientists find evidence of a second-generation planet born from a dying star

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OpenAI says it found a sophisticated recording device hidden in its offices.

character.ai just filed for bankruptcy, and former foe Disney may buy it for parts.

And scientists find evidence of a second-generation planet born from a dying star. It's Wednesday, October 14th. And here's a quick look at some of the news happening in the sphere of tech and science this morning from Engadget.

US federal prosecutors have arrested and charged a Saudi national with allegedly hiding a sophisticated recording device inside of OpenAI's San Francisco headquarters. Per the San Francisco standard, Abdul Rahman Al-Fasan, a 35-year-old engineer who had been with the company since July of last year, has been accused of attempting to record oral conversations between OpenAI employees. Al-Fasan allegedly left a DIY recording device inside of an executive conference room he was not authorized to enter or use. According to the complaint the San Francisco standard saw, prosecutors said meetings inside the room often involved confidential information, including details related to the company's product roadmap, research, and government engagement. OpenAI found the device on September 30th, plugged into a USB port on the back of a TV.

Al-Fasan appears to have used toilet paper to conceal the device. According to prosecutors, he used a productivity tool to collect information about OpenAI's facilities. He may have also used a chatbot to ask how to build, install, and hide a remote recording device. On a chatbot account tied to his spouse, investigators allegedly found prompts asking the AI model how to build a continuous audio recorder and encrypt the SD card. In a statement published to X, OpenAI says it used its own AI models to understand the device, which it also called sophisticated. The company did not find any indication of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data. OpenAI did not immediately respond to Engadget's request for comment and more information.

OpenAI determined the device was installed sometime around September 28th. On October 5th, Alphazon allegedly left behind a bag somewhere else in OpenAI's office. The company's security personnel found Alphazon's wallet, ID, and a second recording device inside the bag. He made his first court appearance on Tuesday. If convicted, he faces up to five years in a federal prison, a quarter-of-a-million-dollar fine, and three years of supervised release.

character.ai A controversial generative AI startup that lets users create their own chatbot characters, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company, which lost key talents to Google and had its former CEO hired by Disney, allowed Disney to make the first offer on its assets for $20 million, pending higher offers. Character expects the sale to be completed by early December. In its blog post, character.ai said it filed for Chapter 11 protection to facilitate the sale of the company and its assets, listing liabilities of between $50 million and $100 million.

As the lead stocking horse bidder, Disney would buy certain assets and provide transition support using staff it previously hired from character.ai. The platform's services will continue, but could be shut down if a buyer is not found. character.ai allows users to create characters and their personalities while setting specific parameters like the name, voice, description, and greeting. Those can then be published to the community for others to chat with or placed in specific scenarios. They can be based on fictional media sources or wholly original. The site, which first appeared in 2022, ran into problems you might expect from an AI company of this nature. Pennsylvania sued character.ai over chatbots pretending to be doctors, and the company was investigated by Texas over what the state attorney general called misleading mental health claims. Disney put a cease and desist order on the company over the use of its cartoon characters, and banned teens from talking to its chatbots last year. Though it once accused Character of damaging its brand, Disney last year hired the company's former CEO, Keterindeep Anand, as its chief technology officer. Prior to that, Google spent $2 billion hiring away much of Character's talent, particularly the company's co-founders, Noam Shazir and Daniel DeFratis.

Way back in 1999, NASA's Hubble Telescope gathered data from a white dwarf star with 100 chemical features that could not be identified. Well, now a team of scientists led by astronomers from the University of Warwick has published a paper in Nature revealing that those chemical features indicate that the white dwarf hosts a second-generation planet, a white dwarf is what remains of a star like our sun, following its red giant phase, wherein it runs out of hydrogen and expands into a massive fireball that's expected to eat up nearby planets, if there are any. It is the dense core left behind after it's done burning up its nuclear fuel and shedding its outer layers. The planets in our solar system, including the Earth, are all first-generation planets. That means they formed using materials from the birth of the sun. Second-generation planets form from the materials a dying star casts off. They are very, very rare, and are mostly suspected to exist around pulsars, which are the highly magnetic and rapidly spinning remnants of dead neutron stars. White dwarfs are more common than pulsars, and Jamie Williams, the lead author of the study, said finding a second-gen planet around one was completely unexpected. Williams found evidence of the planet by looking at Hubble's decades-old observations and comparing them to an updated chemical database. They found that the unidentified chemical features matched an element called niobium, which can only be synthesized in the exotic conditions that briefly emerge inside dying stars. The niobium levels in the system were 1,000 times higher than our suns, and that amount points to the formation of a planet from the dying star's materials. The scientists said that the White Dwarf is still extremely hot and is still blasting the planet with enough heat to strip out its outer layers. But they believe the planet will stay and that it will remain in the White Dwarf's habitable zone for millions of years. Thanks for listening. There's a lot more tech news at engadget.com. This episode featured journalism from Igor Bonifacik, Steve Dent and Mariela Moon. Enjoy your day. I'll be back tomorrow with more tech news from Engadget.