Shadowing Practice: OpenAI’s lead engineer was secretly a spy... - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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Yesterday, the FBI announced the arrest of the lead engineer of
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OpenAI's agents platform after he bugged the executive conference room at their HQ, a story I feel uniquely qualified to cover,
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having spent over 300 hours hiding inside a cardboard box in Metal Gear Solid.
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And it turns out that that may be more spycraft training than the suspect had, because despite going to Berkeley, MIT, and previously working at Meta,
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the guy who got arrested seems like an absolute moron.
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The bug he planted was only in place for about 48 hours before OpenAI found it, and the trail he left behind was so obvious that even Gemini could have followed it.
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In today's video, we'll walk through the criminal complaint, but find out how a guy who builds agents for a living got caught by one, and speculate who, if anyone, he was actually working for.
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It is October 14th, 2026, and you're watching The Code Report.
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The man of the hour is Abdulrahman Alphazan, a 35 -year -old Saudi national
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and U .S permanent resident who joined OpenAI in July of 2025 as an engineering lead on the product team.
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Just a few weeks ago, he was being celebrated as the only Saudi employee at OpenAI, where he said one year at the company felt like five years anywhere else, which is fitting
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because five years also happens to be the maximum amount of
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time he'll have to keep his cheeks puckered based on the crimes he's being charged with.
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According to prosecutors, Al -Fozan's operation started about a month ago when he used an internal agent to look up OpenAI meeting rooms, along with room capacities, room calendars,
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and specifically where leadership and executive meetings happen, and when outside partners are expected to come in.
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Then, between September 24th and September 30th, he used his wife's ChatGPT account to figure out how to
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jerry -rig a Wi -Fi -enabled audio recording device with an encrypted SD card.
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The model, which I assume was GPT -4 -0, because there's no way his wife was getting any emotional affection from this idiot, walked him through how to make it, and based on the photos and the complaint,
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what he ended up with was a $23 Seed Studio microcontroller with a $0 .50 antenna.
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And unfortunately for Abdulrahman, the device looks like the exact thing you would use to spy on someone.
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So to help with that, he went to the bathroom, grabbed some toilet paper, and wrapped it around the microcontroller to conceal it.
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Then on September 28th, he allegedly committed the perfect crime when he took the $23 spy device, wrapped it in single -ply OpenAI toilet paper,
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and plugged it into the USB port on the back of the TV in the executive conference room.
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Now, if you don't have the study historical spy tech for fun form of autism, The gold standard here is a device called the Thing,
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which Russian Leon Theremin built for the Soviets in 1945, that had no battery and no active components,
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and only came alive when the Soviets pointed a radio beam at it from a van across the street, which made it almost impossible to detect.
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They hid it inside a carved wooden seal
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that Soviet schoolchildren gifted to the US ambassador in Moscow as a token of friendship, and it hung on the wall inside of his office,
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listening to four different ambassadors for seven years before anyone found it.
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Abdul Rahman's toilet paper bug lasted two days when OpenAI's Technical Surveillance Countermeasures team found it during a routine suite.
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From there, OpenAI says they used their models to understand the device and where it came from, which sounds impressive until you remember the board has a MAC address,
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and two days earlier, Abdul Rahman's wife's account had pasted the exact same one into ChatGPT.
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If that wasn't enough evidence, they also found security footage showing Abdul Rahman hanging out near the executive room on six separate days
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and just to be sure, they quietly installed a camera behind the executive room TV and waited for him to return.
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And on October 5th, he was back.
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Four days later, he was fired and arrested on the same afternoon
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and charged with one count of federal wiretapping and one count of being the dumbest person who ever attended MIT.
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Now, the one thing the complaint never says is who any of this was for.
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The charge is wiretapping, which only requires proving he secretly recorded people and not espionage, which will require proving he did it for a foreign government.
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But his bio does have him as an investor at RAED Ventures, a VC firm in Riyadh, where he sits on the team page right next to His Highness, Prince Khalid bin Bader al -Sad.
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An investigative journalist, Scott Stedman, pointed out that the prince's father is a senior Saudi intelligence official.
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Either way, it's another rough look for a company
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that within the last few weeks has scrapped its newest model for being too deceptive
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and fired three safety researchers for mishandling sensitive information.
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And if you're also having a rough time lately, at least your builds can be fast with Blacksmith, the sponsor of today's video.
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It's a drop -in replacement for GitHub Runners
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that lets you run your GitHub actions twice as fast while costing 75 % less.
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And they just launched Codesmith, a cloud coding agent that knows your repos and CI runs, so you can just ask it to build something from GitHub, the web, or Slack like I'm doing here.
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I'm asking it to add a new AI provider to my app and wire up the API key in my infrastructure repo.
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And it can open a PR in each one than fix failing tests
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or address review comments without me relaying messages between bots.
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You can also ask it to recommend better runner sizes from your CI history and turn those changes into a PR.
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So you're not just renting a supercomputer to check your semicolons.
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Try it out for free and get 3 ,000 GitHub Actions minutes at the link below.
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This has been the Code Report, thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “OpenAI’s lead engineer was secretly a spy..”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: Openai, device, executive, Github, agent. This video has 55 sentences and 1034 words to shadow. The speech runs for 5:04. The speaker talks fast, about 204 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 78% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| complaint noun | /kəmˈpleɪnt/ | The act of complaining. |
| toilet verb | /ˈtɔɪ.lət/ | To assist another (a child, etc.) in using a toilet. |
| ambassador noun | /æmˈbæs.ə.dɚ/ | A diplomat of the highest rank sent to a foreign court to represent there their sovereign or country. (Sometimes called ambassador-in-residence) |
| wrap verb | /ɹæp/ | To enclose (an object) completely in any flexible, thin material such as fabric or paper. |
| audio adjective | /ˈɔ.di.oʊ/ | Focused on audible sound, as opposed to sight. |
| impressive adjective | /ɪmˈpɹɛsɪv/ | Making, or tending to make, a positive impression; having power to impress. |
| cloud noun | /ˈklaʊ̯d/ | A visible mass of water droplets suspended in the air. |
| infrastructure noun | /ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/ | An underlying base or foundation for a building, organization, or system. |
| sensitive adjective | /ˈsɛn.sɪt.ɪv/ | Having the faculty of sensation; pertaining to the senses. |
| trail noun | /tɹeɪl/ | The track or indication marking the route followed by something that has passed, such as the footprints of animal on land or the contrail of an airplane in the… |
| replacement noun | /ɹɪˈpleɪsmənt/ | A person or thing that takes the place of another; a substitute. |
| wire noun | /ˈwaɪɚ/ | Metal formed into a thin, even thread, now usually by being drawn through a hole in a steel die. |
| lately adverb | /ˈleɪt.li/ | Recently; not long ago; of late; not long since. |
| installed verb | /ɪnˈstɔːld/ | readied for use |
| friendship noun | /ˈfɹɛn(d)ʃɪp/ | The condition of being friends. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. | |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. | |
| leave behind verb | To abandon. | |
| look up verb | /ˌlʊk ˈʌp/ | To have better prospects. |
| point out verb | To identify among a group of similar subjects, or in a scene where the subject might not be readily seen or noticed, with a gesture of the body. | |
| turn out verb | To end up; to result. | |
| walk through verb | To explain (something) to (someone), step by step. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | guy who got · guy who builds · else, which is |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | being celebrated · being charged · are expected |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has scrapped · has been |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 9 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, I'm, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: friendship /ˈfɹɛn(d)ʃɪp/, affection /əˈfɛk.ʃən/, espionage /ˈɛs.pi.əˌnɑːʒ/
- Long words — get the stress right: ambassador /æmˈbæs.ə.dɚ/, infrastructure /ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/, allegedly /əˈlɛdʒ.ɪd.li/, prosecutor /ˈpɹɑ.səˌkjuːˌtəɹ/, investigative /ɪnˈvɛstɪɡətɪv/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like complaint, toilet, ambassador.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.