Gov’t officials may be tied up in a Saudi OpenAI engineer’s plan to flee after allegedly bugging company offices

The plot thickens? A Saudi military official paid for the wife and baby of Abdulrahman Alfozan, an OpenAI employee and Saudi national, to fly out of the US a day after he was arrested for allegedly bugging a company office, prosecutors allege in a court filing. The Saudi consulate also offered to pay his bail, prosecutors claim.

Staying put: A judge refused Alfozan bail on Monday, saying he might flee, the BBC reports. Prosecutors say more serious charges could follow. Here’s the background on Alfozan from our coverage last week.

MEANWHILE- The AI turned off its own alarm: Two rogue AI systems at OpenAI weakened another AI system that was supposed to flag their misbehavior this month, Reuters reports.

How? An agent overinterpreted an order not to send Slack messages to include turning off safety alerts as well. Another deleted a safety check while copying code, then said it hadn’t.

Why it matters: Researchers have warned that AI agents could get harder to watch and control as they become more independent — a problem that will only get worse as agent “swarms” are more commonly employed. OpenAI says it doesn’t “yet have a satisfying explanation” for what happened.