#49 - A $24 Spy Device at OpenAI, and China Wants to Rent Your Face

An OpenAI engineer is accused of hiding a $24 recorder behind a TV in an executive meeting room – wrapped in toilet paper. In China, people now rent out their faces to AI for $15 to $700.

Today is one question: when AI can do the job, what is still worth paying a human for – and who checks what the AI knows about us? A shorter episode with shorter stories.

In this episode:

🌑 A hidden recorder at OpenAI (01:14) — the FBI arrested OpenAI engineer Abdulrahman Alfozan (35) on 9 October, the US Justice Department says. Prosecutors allege he hid a recording device behind a TV in an executive meeting room, plugged into a USB port and wrapped in toilet paper. Business Insider identified it as a Seeed Studio microcontroller that costs about $24. Prosecutors say a ChatGPT account linked to his wife was used to ask how to build and hide a continuous recorder, and Fortune reports he used an internal OpenAI tool to find where high-level meetings happen. OpenAI says it used its own models in the investigation. He is charged with intercepting oral communications – not espionage or theft of trade secrets – and his lawyer warns against jumping to conclusions. These are allegations only.

🌑 Rent your face (05:53) — Rest of World reports Chinese platforms like ActID (Shenzhen) and New Claw now license ordinary people's faces to AI drama studios, for roughly $15 to $700 depending on use. The reason: China's microdrama industry – more than 800 million viewers, over $14 billion last year, and about 430,000 microdramas in the first eight months of 2026, more than 90 percent made with AI somewhere in production. Audiences complained that AI characters all look the same, so studios need real faces again. The business question: owning a video of someone is not the same as owning the right to generate new performances they never gave.

🌑 Character.AI goes bankrupt – Disney bids (10:53) — the chatbot app, valued at one billion dollars in 2023, filed for Chapter 11, Reuters and NBC News report. Disney's opening (stalking-horse) bid is 20 million dollars for a licence to some of its technology (Malcolm says 22 million on air – it's 20). Reuters reports about 12 million active users and an operating loss of 8 to 9 million dollars a month, plus lawsuits in Kentucky and Pennsylvania. Earlier this month Disney hired Character.AI's former CEO, Karandeep Anand, as its CTO. In AI, every conversation comes with a bill.

🌑 ASML is sold out (14:37) — Europe's most valuable tech company, the only maker of EUV machines for the most advanced AI chips, reported record quarterly sales of 11.7 billion euros (not dollars, as said on air). CEO Christophe Fouquet says planned supply for 2027 and 2028 will not fully meet customer demand; some customers want to order for 2029 and 2030. Nobody plans machines four years out for a bubble that pops next quarter.

🌑 Austria: less AI, less training, more fear (16:42) — an Allianz survey of 1,000 people in each of eight countries: 43 percent of Austrians use AI weekly (average 48), only 11 percent got AI training at work (average 17), and the sentiment on job losses is minus 81 percent (average minus 67). One insurer's survey – but it matches what Malcolm sees.

🧵 The thread (18:20) — a $24 device, a rented face, a billion-dollar chatbot sold for a licence fee. AI makes things cheap – the human parts are where the value, and the risk, now sit.

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AI Neanderthal — AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious.