The irony of OpenAI crying foul over spying

Americans can rest easy - for the moment, at least. The fine folks at the Federal Bureau of Investigation have thwarted a major national security threat.

On October 9, the FBI arrested 35-year-old engineer Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi citizen employed at the California-based artificial intelligence company OpenAI, the maker of the chatbot ChatGPT, and a firm that describes its mission as ensuring that "artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity".

A press release from the United States Department of Justice said that Alfozan was accused of installing a "surreptitious audio recording device" in an executive conference room at the OpenAI offices in San Francisco.

The statement quoted Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton's assessment that "this serious situation underscores why winning the global super intelligence race is a national security prerogative". (For those who have not yet got the memo, US President Donald Trump recently decreed that the term "artificial intelligence" be changed to "super intelligence" or "SI.")

FBI director Kash Patel concurred that "protecting American SI innovation is essential to safeguarding our nation's economic strength and national security", and assured everyone that the FBI would continue doing its part "to ensure our country maintains its competitive edge".

So much for the separation of corporation and state in the world's self-appointed greatest democracy.

The covert device was reported to have been concealed in toilet paper and attached to the back of a television monitor. The Gizmodo website has noted with amusement that, despite being cast as a "sophisticated" spying apparatus, the device in question can in fact be easily ordered online "for the low low price of $13.99".

If convicted, Alfozan faces up to five years in jail and a fine of $250,000.

Now, some of you may still be asking what the big deal is - and why the US government is acting like it's 1950 and the Soviets are stealing our nuclear secrets.

The spectacle becomes all the more curious when we consider that the company up in arms over the alleged attempted theft of its technology owes much of its existence - and massive valuation - to stealing stuff from people.

The day before Alfozan's arrest, USA Today and several other newspapers sued OpenAI in a Manhattan federal court for copyright infringement and the unauthorised use of hundreds of thousands of news articles and other materials to develop ChatGPT.

And back in July, various US media outlets including the New York Times and the New York Daily News requested that a federal judge impose sanctions on OpenAI for "hiding and destroying evidence showing how ChatGPT was trained on stolen journalism", as attorney Steven Lieberman put it.

The moral of the story, perhaps, is that when OpenAI steals things it's to "benefit all of humanity" - but when a 35-year-old Saudi engineer does it, it's a national security crisis.

In case we were not already bored to tears hearing about national security, US Attorney General Todd Blanche took to X on Tuesday to preach that the "theft of intellectual property involving cutting-edge super intelligence technology poses a serious threat to our national security", necessitating continued "swift action ... to protect American innovation and safeguard our nation".

Of course, many Americans might wonder why "innovation" gets such special treatment when they themselves are so often on the receiving end of government abuse. The frequency with which US police officers murder unarmed Black people, for instance, would seem to indicate that there are far more literal threats to the nation's security than a $14 device hidden in toilet paper.

But human security is of no interest to a corporatocracy increasingly dominated by AI, an industry that thrives on putting people out of jobs and that is deeply entwined in a number of sordid developments at home and abroad. Among them is mass surveillance, which combines AI-assisted violations of civil liberties and constitutional protections with good old police state "innovation".

To that end, a bunch of US cops have taken advantage of new AI-powered technology, such as automated licence plate readers, to stalk their exes. Then there is the matter of the FBI and other government agencies buying up data en masse from tech companies in a bid to keep tabs, Big Brother-style, on everyone's personal information at all times.

It makes you think twice about the sudden concern for "spying" in the Alfozan case.

As for threats to other people's national security, OpenAI and like-minded tech companies that do business with the Pentagon have been complicit in recent US aggression - from Venezuela to Iran - as the US pursues its strategy for "Accelerating America's Military AI Dominance" (concocted before Trump mandated the renaming of AI as SI).

Israel, too, has exploited OpenAI technology, among other US-made goodies, to conduct its contemporary apocalyptic exercises in the Middle East. Last year, the Associated Press news agency (AP) revealed that US tech giants had "quietly empowered Israel to track and kill many more alleged militants more quickly in Gaza and Lebanon through a sharp spike in artificial intelligence and computing services".

The AP report went on to note that "the number of civilians killed has also soared, fueling fears that these tools are contributing to the deaths of innocent people".

But while it might be news to the AP, that is unfortunately how a genocide works.

And as the US goes to war for AI dominance while the tech giants bank on a post-human world, one can't help but feel that the toilet paper was a nice touch, indeed.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.