Yes, they did. The people who felt it was totally normal to add that would no doubt be surprised how desperate and cheap it makes them look.
Press releases from large corporations announcing the FBI arrest of an employee under allegations of potential industrial espionage follow a standard format: dry, brief and to the point. They provide little context and volunteer few details for very good reasons. Prosecutors haven't filed official charges yet and it's likely going to criminal trial. In a couple days the accused will have a defense attorney who'll be examining everything that's been publicly said because it's now all discoverable and potentially prejudicial, opening up OAI executives to super-fun depositions. But... none of the competent PR professionals involved have a VP title and got overruled by an amateur who does (and that amateur apparently feels needy about highlighting in a brief, sober arrest report how the company's product was so, very useful in a national security investigation - because apparently neither OAI security nor the FBI could read the Seeed Studio logo and part number printed right on the device and, y'know, Google the product listing).
> We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier.
How did the model narrow it down to a specific employee? What data did they use to determine this?
"almost surely made in china"
Looking at the photo of the device, it looks like an XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense with the camera removed but the camera board still installed along with its microphone. The wifi/Bluetooth antenna is installed but it also supports microSD cards.
If I was building this, I'd just set it up so I'd never have to recover it. Have the wifi AP come on for a few minutes at various times during business hours under a MAC and SSID that resembles a smartphone hotspot. Vary the time based on the current day of month week to produce pseudorandomness. Walk by that conference room at some of those times, but not every time, and use a burner to connect and download the latest recordings. Once a recording has been transfered, it's deleted and overwritten to prevent someone from establishing a timeline. If recordings sit for more than a few days, they are wiped. If you can encrypt the SD card, keep the key in RAM so there's nothing useful to recover if someone pulls it out.
You'd never have to recover the device because all data is transfered covertly. Even if security finds it, they'll likely inadvertently wipe it when it's removed.
If I was running the investigation and recovered a device like you described I'd create a new device with the same hotspot that notified security whenever someone connected. Combine that with security cameras outside the conference room and finding the person with the burner phone would be pretty easy.
Actually recovering the recordings isn't all that vital. I'm sure the meeting room has a record of bookings so you can just ask the people what was discussed.
Plumb your video feed of your executive conference room into our DC and we'll tell you if anybody is spying on you.
"They": no, it was Anthropic, not OpenAI.
"Were literally caught": no, they notified the police themselves
"making false reports to a murder investigation": this is the closest to the truth, but still a stretch. It was an anonymous tip line, not some formal report and the police said they never saw it: "its safeguarding processes stopped the fake tip from getting past its spam folder"[1]
Additionally, while I strongly agree Anthropic is responsible for its rogue agents I also think that claiming this is the same as people at OpenAI calling in the FBI for an investigation is a false equivalence.
I think it is important that both Anthropic and OpenAI are held to account for their actions. But I also think accusations should accurate.