OpenAI called a $13.99 hobbyist chip a 'sophisticated recording device.' It has a 2-megapixel camera.

Someone allegedly bugged an OpenAI conference room in San Francisco. The Justice Department named the suspect on Tuesday as Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi national who is said to have hidden a tiny microphone and camera behind a conference room TV, where it dutifully filmed the back of the TV for the duration.

The device in question is a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense. It is the width of a thumbnail. It costs $13.99. OpenAI described it, in a formal statement, as a "sophisticated recording device."

The camera resolution is 2 megapixels, which you may remember as the resolution from the first generation iPhone. The Seeed website's own AI demo voice admits the images come out blurry. This did not stop the FBI director from announcing, with apparent gravity, that the suspect had placed a device to "secretly capture sensitive communications about the company's super intelligence technology."

What the device mostly captured was its own reflection.

The suspect was reportedly using ChatGPT, via his wife's account, to research how to build and hide the thing, which is genuinely the most OpenAI-adjacent detail in this entire story. The company then used its own AI models to catch him. At $13.99 a unit, corporate espionage has never been more accessible, or more 2-megapixel.