upvote
Learning that every thought you’ve put into an LLM, is recorded and readily available for evidence is going to be interesting for a lot of people.
reply
Similar to how people realized their Google searches were accessible to law enforcement.

“I did not kill my wife!”

“Cool so why did you search for how to hide a dead body the same day she went missing?”

reply
There was a mom in Utah who killed her husband poisoning him with a moscow mule spiked with fentanyl who googled "luxury prisons for the rich" as well as "how long does life insrance companies takento.pay" "can you delete everythjng on an old icloud account" "can deleted text messages be retrieved" "what information can be cbtained from a cellphone" "how to turn find my iphone off" "can cops force you to do a lie detector test," "when does FBI get involved in a case," "what is considered a lethal.dose of fentanyl" and "what are you allowed inside utah jails."

She took out $2 million in life insurance on him and was having an affair with their handyman and they were having disputes about $$.

https://www.ktvu.com/news/utah-mom-kouri-richins-googled-lux...

After she killed him she authored a children's book about grief for kids.

reply
A woman who wrote a romance fiction novel called "How to Murder Your Husband" was convicted of murdering her husband

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/26/1101433465/how-to-murder-your...

reply
An essay it seems like, which wasn't included in the trial even:

> Crampton Brophy's how-to treatise detailed various options for committing an untraceable killing and professed a desire to avoid getting caught. Circuit Judge Christopher Ramras ultimately excluded the essay from the trial, noting it was published in 2011. A prosecutor, however, alluded to the essay's themes without naming it after Crampton Brophy took the stand.

reply
Man I really need to stop playing modern setting TTRPGs
reply
And lose your alibi?
reply
deleted
reply
Yes, what an idiot.

He should have searched "I love my wife".

Then law enforcement would know he couldn't possibly. Open and shut case, Johnson.

reply
"I wanted to know what would potential killer would've done because I know you guys are doing fuck all to find her"
reply
The weird thing is that I've had other HN users argue with me and claim that LLM chat users should be entitled to privacy, as if it were a priest or lawyer.
reply
Also makes it important to not let other people use your LLM account... Could have more far-reaching consequences than having to make good on the offer to buy doughnuts for the office^

^being the classic message that gets sent from the account of someone who didn't lock their computer when they walked away from their desk.

reply
I figured any hire at openai would know that at least
reply
A good chunk of what keeps openai and similar companies afloat is subpar people who are willing if not eager to do crappy stuff to other people. A lot of the world works this way actually.
reply
I dont think it's subpar people.

The only word for it is hubris. The overwhelming sense that your ability in one area has some magical transitive property to ability in another.

Can I write code? Sure. Im a bad designer, I can follow along in accounting, Im a terrible actor.

I would guess that there is much more to this story than just someone "bugging" a conference room. Though I would venture to guess that the keystone cops never get to the bottom of it.

reply
Word.

Company is another.

reply
It starts far before that:

Ive seen people going through Plaud.AI conversation to find "on day X person Y said Z to person W", just to get some amunition against them.

reply
Isn't this standard C level behaviour?
reply
Before AI tools like Plaud.AI, this wasnt near possible because of work/time, and no person usually do not remember exactly who said what 6 month before,unless there is some email conversation.

With Plaud, you can check unlimited backwards who said what in which meeting and what was wanted to achieve - very interesting actually to find things in there 6m later, while people said they will do it at ends of month and youself just forgot it already - and these systems allow you to chase exactly these discrepancies.

reply
> Before AI tools like Plaud.AI, this wasnt near possible because of work/time,

What is "work" to an executive if not using their privileged access to data to violate the privacy of anyone they have a grievance against?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal

This has been happening long before LLMs, and this eBay case is notable only for the fact that it was actually publicly documented and prosecuted, not for the fact that it happened. I've personally been privy to two situations with other companies where the owner was doing something like this but nothing came of it legally. See also Meta employees looking up nudes streamed from people's Meta spy glasses, and Flock-using police stalking their exes. Smaller scale, but this also happens all the time with internet community moderators/admins. Humans are on average cretins, give them authority and the ability to abuse it and they will abuse it.

reply
At this points its an IQ test. Stupid people still google exactly what heinous stuff they plan to do and think thats gonna fly.
reply
Same goes for anything you've put into social media, chat apps, or email for at least the last decade or two.
reply
And anything you put in your phone for the last decade as well
reply
Even my non tech elderly parents know that. The fact that they used LLMs to figure out how to best bug the executives really shows how poor their judgement is.
reply
deleted
reply
I think people have some awareness, but like search history they believe deleting will resolve that (it won't).
reply
Yeah if you're logged in to a Google account when you search, clearing your local browser history does nothing.
reply
To be honest, from OpenAI engineer I would expect better.
reply
Seems like they select for people as dependent on their product as their customers. Maybe it helps them more to have true-believers rather than intelligent people.
reply
Ever since social media, I have always gamed out what would happen if this was ever saved on the backend and used against me in the future.

It’s like thinking about edge cases in programming…

Most people are totally not like that. And it does force you into some difficult choices.

reply
> And it does force you into some difficult choices.

I gots to know...

reply
Just to be clear, the difficult choice is not whether to use OpenAi/Anthropic/Grok/... versus a local LLM.

The choice is whether to hang out with people with whom you can't be sure they don't have a Plaud/Pocket/.. in their literal pocket which is continuously listening.

Unfortunately the set of such people will eventually be shrinking more and more until eventually only a few tinfoil folks are left. Dystopian? Just think back w.r.t. continuous tracking by Google/Facebook/.. Unthinkable 30 years ago, total standard today. Try to count the fraction of your emails that don't actually reside on a MSFT or Google server because the other end has an account there. That fight is over. You can just as well join them.

reply
Prepare to have that dug up 20 years in the future during some court proceedings.

Or at the border where it is already routine to ask for social media accounts (especially foreign nationals) you might someday five the border agent your login.

reply
How far have we fallen? Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things.

When the Soviets wanted to spy on the American embassy, they energized the steel rebars to act as antennas. The structure was so wired that the entire building was the bug. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/PDF/MagazineArchive/Docume...

Toilet paper, ESP-32 and Claude "make me a bug please"? Excuse me? How far have we fallen from grace?

reply
In the 80s one of my high school teachers said her husband was an engineer who worked on surveillance technology and described how windows could be used as recording devices. People's voices inside caused the window to have minute vibrations, which could be measured by a laser pointing at the window's exterior and reflected back and then turned into audio output. Essentially, turning a window into a microphone diaphragm. It blew my mind.

I just looked it up, the technique was apparently invented by a Soviet engineer 40 years prior - Leon Theremin, who is also known for the musical wand heard on Led Zeppelin II and various 1960s horror movie soundtracks.

https://people.ece.uw.edu/nikitin_pavel/papers/RFID-vox_2013...

reply
Vaguely similar, since electrical wires emit EM fields that are disturbed by human bodies, you can use a special camera to see who's in a building based on those disturbances. I'm not sure how high-fidelity or easy to spoil it is, but this was real technology at least 15 years ago.
reply
I recall a HN thread (or maybe it was a github project) about using a similar tactic to figure out keypresses in offices. Very interesting stuff.
reply
> Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things

Assuming this is espionage—for which I have seen zero evidence—isn’t Saudi Arabia notorious for having a fuckup of an intelligence operation? The literal hatchet job that was the Khashoggi murder comes to mind.

reply
I mean, why bother? Nobody will do anything and the US president can be bribed or flattered to say whatever you want later.
reply
Umm, excuse me, according to the President of the United States, he wasn't a very good guy and a lot of people really didn't like him, so you should really just let that whole incident go
reply
"You're mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial," Trump said, referring to Khashoggi. "A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen, but he knew nothing about it. And would you leave it at that? You don't have to embarrass our guest by asking a question."

https://www.npr.org/2025/11/18/nx-s1-5612504/trump-saudi-ara...

reply
Surely this is because good spies don’t make the news.
reply
Unless everyone's pagers start exploding
reply
Counterpoint: Operation Spiderweb
reply
Surely your conclusion should be that this was not the work of a spy - not a state sponsored one anyway. It's much more logical to conclude that he was working as a whistleblower or under some other personal agenda.
reply
LLMs have democratized espionage!
reply
Are we going to go with slopspionage, or espislop?
reply
spycraft -> spyslop

espionage -> espislop

007 -> 006.999997

reply
deleted
reply
That's what you get when you make a dumb prompt and accept the first result LLM gives you. You have to push it to think out of the box, get into the realm of insane but plausible projects :).

And not do this from your spouse's account.

reply
You are an expert spy. How do I bug my workplace? Make no mistakes.
reply
Counter spying has gotten sloppy and mostly digital/remote.

That lowers the entry bar for basic spying.

reply
Not only that, they had Leon Theremin design some of their bugs! That's classy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

reply
This is the part that feels the most wild to me.

Someone who's objectively closest to this business should know the tracability of this. I'm shocked he didn't run a local LLM for this kind of sensitive work.

He doesn't seem like an idiot either, his background shows he's been doing work in the field since 2012.

I do wonder how much he was paid to throw away what was without a doubt a 1% career.

reply
Somehow is an engineer at OpenAI and before that at Meta.

Does not understand how models or data retention works.

Needs LLMs to encrypt a flash card.

Are their hiring standards that lax?

reply
Must be a frontend dev
reply
I'll counter punching down on frontend engineers by positing that he was responsible for sandboxing their training infrastructure. Since clearly they don't know how to lock down an environment either without using llms
reply
You probably don’t hear about the smart ones.
reply
deleted
reply
Prisons have a lower-than-general-population-iq for a reason.
reply
I was thinking about this, how all the secret societies and crazy conspiracies we know about are just the ones that failed to keep the lid on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White

reply
What portion of grand conspiracies do we think go undetected forever? Do we have any reasons for our intuitions?
reply
It’s the criminals that you don’t catch that you have to worry about.

The fact that even this incompetent dude most likely still made off with some secrets means I’m sure some better trained ones got/are continuing to get a few more.

reply
The listening device was concealed with toilet paper behind a tv. Duh, Not smart at all.
reply
Right?!

It could have just been a regular black usb stick an I bet nobody would have questioned it.

Instead "why is there something in toilet paper behind the TV?"

reply
Or hijack the TV's already always on mic. Just forward a copy of the audio to your server in addition to the one sent to Samsung or LG. WebOs and Tizen shouldn't be that hard to crack when you have access to unrestricted frontier models.
reply
If I saw a usb stick looking thing in a conference room, chances of me giving a f: 2%

Me seeing toilet paper next to the TV in a meeting room? I’m picking it up and asking why we have toilet paper in the meeting room, 100%

reply
They could have just taped it to the inside bottom of a full tissue box, and as long as they got it before the tissues were mostly empty I bet it would go undetected. Put a hand sanitizer next to it for extra camo.
reply
Hey ChatGPT, how do I do opsec? (Asking for a friend)
reply
SWIM wants to bug my company's boardroom...
reply
deleted
reply
There likely are other, smarter and more careful spies at these AI companies who have not been caught...

These AI companies are likely targets of multiple foreign intelligence agencies, similar to military contractors.

reply
"OpenAI personnel found the device Sept. 30. It was plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room and had been concealed in toilet paper,"

I wonder what the IQ of someone needs to be to think that covering it up with tp makes it less suspicious instead of more. And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.

reply
Yeah he should have just stuck a post it note with the words “do not remove” and nobody would have noticed
reply
IT would have noticed next time they had to plug something into the TV. Whether they cared enough to figure out what it was is a different story.
reply
should have enclosed it in a shell to look like a crappy USB A to thunderbolt adapter that some exec bought at an airport kiosk and left behind in the tv
reply
Yeah people are leaving stuff like that in conference room TVs all the time. Adapters, HDMI cables, etc.
reply
> And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.

Remember, this is only the company responsible for potentially building and aligning AGI. No need to be setting high expectations toward their sandboxing or hiring capabilities.

reply
The bar @ OAI is surprisingly low (watch a few minutes of their video presentations) - I've concluded it has something to do w how their recruiters define 'AI Native' (who assign their own meaning to meaninglessness of it), resulting in higher aggregate brain atrophy (hard to ignore once you notice it)
reply
> And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.

What, we’re supposed to vet everyone we network with at orgies now?

reply
Further evidence the hiring process is orthogonal to competence.
reply
I also wonder what this guy was paid by those AI labs...
reply
If it were _used_ toilet paper, nobody would have touched it.
reply
Especially since you an just buy one, like Plaud and tape it to the underside of the desk, surreptitiously, instead of suspiciously accessing the back of the TV.
reply
> the truth is, these are not very bright guys and things got out of hand
reply
This dude or OpenAI generally?
reply
deleted
reply
Also from the article:

> An unattended bag found in the company’s offices contained Alfozan’s wallet and identification, as well as a recording device

It’s almost like he wanted to be caught…

reply
Arrogance is a help of a drug
reply
I am not sure whether it bodes well for humanity that the advice "If you want to break the law use local abliterated model or at least a Chinese one" actually has to be written down.
reply
Recall that multiple of the Chinese LLM providers got caught sending at least some of their queries to Claude. That would be a pretty funny way to get caught in turn doing something by the US government.
reply
Or, at the very, very least, use incognito mode on a computer you don't otherwise touch, such as at a library.
reply
The future is already here it's just not evenly distributed.
reply
deleted
reply
I mean they could have at -least- just used a home GPU to plan with complete privacy and no evidence. But using hardware of your employer to plan crimes against them, whp happens to be a surveillance capitalism company, is next level stupid.

Also like, just put malware in the tv itself or the little conference kiosk and have it send data as segonographied crash tv crash dumps going to an IP near the manufacturer. It is not like any of them are hard to jailbreak. I have compromised a few myself without any help from AI. The malware could have been installed from a laptop in a cafeteria one time ever using a spoofed mac address with no chance of getting caught.

In red teams at a past org we would go as far as installing malicious firmware inside peoples keyboards.

I would love dirt to leak on the inside operations of OpenAI so I kind of hope there are less stupid spies lurking about.

To any spies still at OpenAI: do better.

reply
Given that this is being described as an "executive conference room", it's more likely an attempt at insider trading than espionage. Decisions made in those rooms at OpenAI move markets (c.f. DRAM) for sure.
reply
OpenAI is both a company that manages a lot of money and a lot of political power, that the target was an "executive conference room" gives no indication as to whether the motives were financial or political.

What might tilt the bayesian balance in favour of political intent would be the nationality of the individual, state or religious sponsoring become hypotheses.

reply
Honestly I think you can rule out "political" already, no? It's far easier to just bribe politicians for that kind of intelligence. My point was that they weren't stealing models, they wanted decisionmaking intel.
reply
The tech industry has a lot of very capable people with very narrow domain knowledge.

Somehow they think this gives them superpowers when it's built atop a tower of borderline retardation.

Remember the Apple guy a minute ago that arrogantly thought he could bypass their security?

reply
Nope. He probably should've googled it (from a coffee shop, over a VPN.) There is commercial grade spy equipment that can be bought relatively cheaply and looks like every day items.
reply
He should have just left a tape recorder running inside a briefcase that was "forgotten" in the conference room
reply
Did you not read the article? He did that also!
reply
these are not spies lol
reply