Sumi—and her male counterpart Niko—are virtual personalities that users can toggle between on Razer AVA, a desktop AI companion powered by xAI’s Grok. Each has a scripted backstory: Sumi is an illustrator from Tokyo who has a calico cat and enjoys “cozy gaming,” while Niko is a freelance engineer and skater living in downtown Los Angeles. Sumi is kind and warm, while Niko is more curt and to-the-point.

They’re some of the newest faces of Razer, a cult gaming hardware brand that’s now trying to become an AI company.

“AI is going to bring a new renaissance to all of gaming,” Min-Liang Tan, Razer’s co-founder and CEO, tells Fortune at the firm’s Singapore office. “Today, gaming is an industry worth hundreds of billions, and we believe that AI will make it a trillion-dollar one.”

The industry generated roughly $188.8 billion in revenue last year, serving over 3.5 billion players worldwide. Tan—who has spent two decades telling anyone who would listen that everyone would eventually become a gamer—is convinced AI is the force that finally gets gaming there. 

‘A gamer first’

Tan’s route into the industry was sideways. A lawyer by training, he grew up an avid player of fantasy role-playing games like Ultima, the series created by game designer Richard Garriott in the 1980s.

“I would say I was a gamer first, rather than being a lawyer first,” Tan says. “But like every good Asian child, my parents only gave me the option of being either a doctor or lawyer.”

In 1999, while still practicing law, Tan teamed up with Robert Krakoff, an American businessman he had met while gaming online, to build a gaming mouse. They named it the Boomslang, after a fast-striking African snake, because “we wanted to make a product which eats up other mice,” as Tan tells it. “Everyone else was calling their computer mice the MX2000 or FX500.”

“We went on the servers and we got kicked out for hacking,” he adds. 

Tan and Krakoff established Razer in 2005. Now, the firm employs over 1,500 people with dual headquarters in Irvine, Calif. and Singapore’s Queenstown district. About half its business is in the U.S., 30% in Europe, and less than 1% in Singapore, by Tan’s account. “We’re probably more American than Singaporean,” he says.

Within its first five years, the company had built “a cult following”—people tattooing the three-headed snake logo on themselves and building “shrines” to the brand. “We believed everyone was going to be a gamer in the future. Fast-forward 20 years, and I dare say pretty much everyone’s a gamer right now,” Tan says. 

He adds that the gaming industry—and the demographic of gamers—has shifted significantly.

“It was a predominantly male demographic aged between 12 and 25, with most of us living in our parents’ basement; it was a little bit of a subculture back then,” Tan says. Now, it’s a 50-50 split between men and women. 

AI ambitions

In 2022, Tan and private equity firm CVC Capital Partners took Razer private, ending a five-year-run on Hong Kong’s stock market. (In a nod to its gamer roots, Razer had the ticker 1337, or “leet” in gamer slang). Tan says the company was already starting to work on AI—or what he calls “cognitive gaming”—and going private let him think about the new technology without worrying about the “quarterly commitments of a publicly listed company.”

It’s given him the freedom to think big about Razer’s future. “We are probably going to be one of the largest AI hardware companies on the planet,” he predicts. 

On Sept. 28, the firm unveiled a wearable headset named Barracuda AI. The AI-equipped headset comes with built-in computer vision (via integrated cameras), smart audio processing and compatibility across various AI models like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

Previous attempts to release smart glasses have run up against privacy concerns, particularly on non-consensual recording. Tan says the company is taking a “privacy-first” approach to its wearables. “It’s definitely not down the route of where Meta is going,” he says. 

Sumi and Niko, Razer’s AI avatars, are another part of the company’s AI lineup. Razer has given its avatars “personality and emotion engines,” Tan says. Razer AVA has yet to be publicly released, but is expected to ship by the “second half of 2026”, according to its website.

Finally, Razer is betting on AI in game development. Last Wednesday (Oct. 7), Google and gaming tools developer Unity launched an AI game creation platform called Playground, allowing users to create video games with a simple prompt. 

“Now, everyone can create games with just their imagination, even without technical skills,” Tan says, adding that AI will also fundamentally change how games are experienced and played. “You’re going to see much larger games where there will be virtual worlds run by AI, and that can mimic or transcend the size of our world at this point in time.”

Yet gaming storefronts are already flooded with a sea of so-called shovelware, or low-quality buggy products made with minimal effort. Generative AI, by making it easier to make video games, could make the problem even worse. 

One in five games released on Steam last year disclosed the use of generative AI—an eightfold increase in a year, according to a study of the storefront’s catalog. In a single week this June, 120 of the roughly 300 games released on Steam carried an AI disclosure, according to a survey from gaming publication PC Gamer. A separate study of 53,000 titles found that AI-made games account for up to 90% of the growth in monthly releases—and that almost none of them make money.

Last year, Tan and his team launched the Razer QA Co-AI, an AI-powered game testing tool designed to catch performance issues and review AI-generated bug drafts. “We don’t like AI slop,” he says. “When you get a huge glut of content created, which is not very good, we can then help them make it better.”

Tan is unmoved by the debate over whether AI is moving too fast. “AI is going to be inevitable, and the genie is already out of the bottle,” he concludes. “What we can do is to see how we can effectively harness it.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Her mission is deeply personal: As a mother of three young kids, she ran into serious gaps in maternal care herself, despite having access to the resources of a family worth an estimated $500 billion.

“It’s personal,” Walton told leadership editor and summit cochair Claire Zillman onstage at Fortune’s annual Most Powerful Women conference in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Monday. “I went through it myself, and I saw that even with all my resources, with my family, with my education, it was still really hard.”

When Walton had her middle child in 2020, she said that she didn’t get the “postpartum care she needed” from facilities in her home state of Arkansas. And when she took a step back to look at the full picture, she quickly recognized other women in her state were suffering, too. Arkansas has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the country, Walton noted, which is around double the national average. 

“Women are dying in Arkansas from complications from giving birth at the same rate they are in Cuba. And don’t forget—never forget—that for Black and brown women, the mortality rate is three times higher,” Walton said. “We have the medicine, we have the science. What we need is the political will. We need the awareness.”

Now she and her husband, Tom Walton, are hoping to turn awareness into action with their bipartisan nonprofit campaign. Through Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America, they’re using “every tool in the toolbox” to drive change—from storytelling and advocacy work, to coalition-building and catalytic grant-making. Arkansas and Kansas will each receive $10 million from the foundation to improve their maternal health. The issue could worsen as we head into the next year, due to Medicaid cuts and changes in the way the American Medical Association bills patients, Walton said. But she said she has hope people on both sides of the political spectrum can agree on one thing when it comes to maternal health care: “Everybody wants healthy families.”

However, a $100 million pledge isn’t enough to sustain that progress on its own. Walton stressed the importance of bolstering the maternal health workforce with more midwives and doulas. And beyond getting more workers into the industry, she called on employers to improve their pregnancy and postpartum benefits. After all, large, self-insured companies that improve their perinatal benefits see their costs come down and outcomes improve, Walton said.

“Expand your benefits,” the philanthropist said. “Take better care of moms, not because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s usually the smart thing to do for your business.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

“He’s asking all the right questions, and he’s thinking about all the right issues,” Huang told Fortune in an interview Wednesday, when asked about the pope’s remarks. “I’m looking forward to seeing them.”

Pope Leo made the earlier comments at a press conference in late September. He told reporters concerns that AI could destroy the world are not “fake news” and should be taken seriously, in an apparent rebuke to President Donald Trump, who had told the UN General Assembly the previous week that he believed fears about AI’s dangers were a “hoax.”

The pope also directly criticized Huang, saying he was skeptical of Nvidia’s announcement about AI guardrails because Huang has argued there should be no limits and no government regulation.

Huang told CBS News earlier this month that he agreed with Trump that AI safety concerns were overblown. Nvidia has also launched a software platform that is aimed at stopping AI agents from breaching containment.

Huang told Fortune he was unsure what the pope meant, but defended Nvidia’s record. “I’m not exactly sure what was intended, but the facts are that few are doing as much in advancing AI safety in a way that helps the entire industry as we are,” he said.

He pointed to Nvidia’s open-source safety technology; its work on a framework for improving the quality of companies; and its efforts on audit, governance, and standards-setting. “We are doing as much as we can, and the things that we’re doing are going to dramatically help,” he said.

Huang argued the tools would have helped in incidents that have already occurred. “We can always talk about hypothetical incidents that have not happened, but as an engineer, we should develop the technology and methodologies and practices to deal with the incidents that have happened,” he said.

He also said he had common ground with some of the pope’s concerns. “We all care about the same thing, which is an optimistic future where this technology has great positive impact in society while doing it with great responsibility, safety, and accountability,” Huang said.

The pope, who has warned of the dangers of AI throughout his 16-month papacy, urged the world “to promote dialogue, study, investigation” with regard to the technology.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

“I’ve heard a lot of stories from founders that had gone through acquisitions and had regrets and were not super happy with where their brand went,” Bieber said onstage at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit on Wednesday. “I went into it with a mindset of really wanting to know that Rhode was going to be safe where it was going.”

Bieber and Lauren Ratner launched Rhode in 2022, and three years later e.l.f. Beauty agreed to buy the brand in a deal worth up to $1 billion, one of the buzziest beauty acquisitions in recent years. Bieber has since stayed on to lead creative and product innovation alongside Ratner, Rhode’s cofounder, president, and chief brand officer. 

For Bieber, the deciding factor wasn’t the price. In fact, Bieber said discussions about profit margins hate to see her coming, she told Fortune’s Ellie Austin. When deciding whether to sell the brand she launched, Bieber said she wanted to know that she would still have a major role in the company she helped build. 

“That was my one fear, really—that I would sell my company, and then they were gonna say, ‘Okay, we’re gonna put this person in and this person in,’ and then, ‘We want to make the team bigger around product development,’ and that I would start feeling like I didn’t have as much say,” she said. “It’s my baby, it’s our baby. We’ve grown it from literally day zero, ground up.”

‘We’re not going to fix what’s not broken’

Bieber said she laid out every concern to e.l.f. from the beginning, including that she couldn’t imagine stepping back from the business. Their response was a happy surprise.

“They were like, ‘Oh my gosh, we want you to be more involved if you want to,’” Bieber recalled. “I feel like you never hear that from an acquirer—that they want you to be as in it as you were before, if not even more.”

Ratner said the pair worried an acquirer might start “meddling in the business,” dictating how Rhode should move forward. Instead, she said, e.l.f. was explicit about its intentions. “E.l.f. was very clear: ‘We’re not going to fix what’s not broken. You guys are doing an incredible job. You have a secret, special sauce,’” Ratner said. “‘We just want to supercharge the back end, and let you guys do what you do best.’”

Bieber said e.l.f. walked her through, in detail, how it had supported the founders of every brand it had previously acquired.

“They told me, ‘We don’t want to come in, we don’t want to change anything. We really want you to continue operating exactly how you are,’” she said. “You have to trust that, and you have to follow your instinct.”

More than a year after the deal, Bieber says e.l.f. has kept its word. When Austin asked her which decisions remain exclusively hers, she didn’t hesitate.

“Pretty much all of them,” Bieber said. “Everything that they said before we were acquired, they have stuck to 100%. They have really just let us fly and let us continue to make every decision.”

If anything, her role has grown, she added. Bieber now holds the title of chief creative officer at Rhode and serves as a strategic advisor to e.l.f. Beauty as a whole, weighing in on the parent company’s products. “Any question they have for me, they can come to me and ask me, ‘Hey, what do you think about this product? Will you test this for us?’” she said. “It really has been genuinely the dream scenario.”

Why sell at all?

Rhode was growing quickly on its own, and Bieber and Ratner said a sale wasn’t on their immediate agenda. “I don’t think we at that moment were thinking, ‘This is what we’re going to do right now,’” Bieber said, adding that the opportunity “took us a little bit by surprise.” She declined to say who approached whom.

Timing mattered. Rhode was preparing to launch in Sephora, and Bieber wanted a partner that had done it before. Ratner said the brand’s lean team had reached its limits.

“We had a small, mighty, nimble team, and we felt like we had taken it as far as we could with that team,” Ratner said. “We really needed the infrastructure of a bigger partner to scale globally.”

Bieber said she, Ratner, and Ratner’s husband—Rhode’s third cofounder—reached the decision together. “When you have the synergy of all feeling good about it, it also makes the decision seem even more right,” she said.

The bet appears to be paying off. Rhode generated roughly $390 million in net sales in fiscal 2026, an 80% increase from the year before, and the company has said it wants to pass $1 billion.

Getting there depends on retail. Rhode, which built its business selling direct to consumers, entered Sephora in the U.S. last September. Ratner said Rhode is now the No. 1 brand in every retail market it operates in, including Sephora U.S., Sephora U.K., and Mecca in Australia.

A couple of weeks ago, the brand launched with Sephora in Europe across 19 new markets and more than 500 doors.

“Our first day of online sales for Rhode with Sephora EU actually surpassed the total Sephora EU Black Friday sales for the year prior,” Ratner said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Speaking on Wednesday at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, Knowles said Cécred, the hair care line she launched with her daughter Beyoncé Knowles Carter in February 2024, is the product of four decades in business, fashion, and entertainment. In the Houston hair salon where the Knowles matriarch started her career, she relied on products that had human hair ground into them to add protein to strands. Knowles would whip up butter and hot olive oil treatments to bring more moisture and balance to her clients’ hair, including her daughters. Knowles said both Knowles Carter and actress and singer-songwriter Solange Knowles worked in her salon.

“The dream has always been to create a product that had everything that you need in one product and one step,” Knowles told Fortune senior writer Sheryl Estrada. “And Beyoncé had that dream as well—because I was doing all those things to her hair.”

Knowles said Knowles Carter decided to fund the hair care line herself rather than working with outside investors because the two were so focused on research and development. Investors balked at the costs. Knowles said they wanted a product that wouldn’t merely lay on top of strands to make them feel smooth, but instead wanted a product that could penetrate all types of hair textures.

“Our customers have done the marketing for us because it’s really a quality product,” said Knowles.

The line is a family story, Knowles told Estrada. Her daughters first worked as sweepers at Knowles’s Headliners salon, and Knowles said she worked with plenty of entrepreneurial women there. Blockbuster musical group Destiny’s Child got its start performing for salon customers.

Knowles started the Headliners hair salon business after her marriage ended, and she needed to support her children. She told Estrada she decided at the time she would never be dependent again. Her own salon visits would take hours, so she made Headliners a go-to spot for professional women short on time. Clients were seen within 15 minutes or they would get their money back.

Knowles, who published her bestselling memoir, Matriarch, last year, said that while writing it she learned that the women in her family had a history of working and designing clothing as seamstresses, going back to her great- and great-great-grandmothers, who were enslaved. She later styled Destiny’s Child through its rise and cofounded a fashion label.

Since launching two years ago, Cécred has posted the most successful prestige hair care debut in Ulta Beauty’s history, won 89 beauty industry awards, and expanded into the U.K. The team behind the brand tests its styling and restoring serums and conditioners in three countries to try to reach every hair texture.

Despite the success, Knowles was candid about how two divorces in her past have shaped her. When she divorced at 59, she thought her life was over. But Knowles picked herself up and made it a turning point. She went back to museums, she said, and picked up art books and prioritized herself again. For years, she had remained low-key in order to avoid embarrassing her children, she said.

“I didn’t take credit for a lot of the work that I did as a woman,” said Knowles. “We just do it because it needs to be done.”

At 70, she found herself going through a second divorce, which also left its mark.

“There’s something about those divorces that make you take a look at yourself,” she added. That’s when she started writing, partly to set an accurate record down about her family, which strangers narrate on a daily basis on social media. Writing it down, she said, became therapeutic. It made her a bestselling author at 71.

Now at 72, Knowles has shifted her focus to philanthropy, a passion she’d like to pursue full-time in the next few years. She chairs BeyGOOD, Beyoncé’s charitable foundation, on top of Cécred. She also has her own charity, Waco (Where Art Can Occur), which she started with her ex-husband. The group mentors girls from Los Angeles communities, offering them trips to art museums and lessons in etiquette, as well as teaching them life skills they wouldn’t receive otherwise.

Next up, she plans to work on the Vision Theatre in Los Angeles’ Leimert Park. Actress Marla Gibbs invested in the theater and planned to turn it into a performing arts center, but lost the building after riots occurred. The city has since poured millions into its restoration, and Knowles plans to follow Gibbs’s lead and make it a community arts center.

Knowles noted that after about five career pivots, she goes into new ventures with no fear. Her advice to younger generations is to give it your all, and if it doesn’t work, bring what you learned into the next thing you do. A strong work ethic matters, she said, along with never feeling entitled to anything.

“Just be authentically yourself,” said Knowles. “That’s my mantra.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Koch Disruptive Technologies, the venture arm of Koch Inc., is making a strategic investment in the San Francisco–based startup, Emanate told Fortune exclusively.

Koch, the second-largest private company in the U.S., runs refineries, factories, and farm-to-market supply chains, as well as software and logistics businesses. Koch said it generates more than $125 billion in annual revenue and employs about 120,000 people in more than 50 countries.

“While much of the conversation around AI has centered on efficiency and cost reduction, we believe some of the biggest opportunities lie in helping companies accelerate growth,” Jon Chisholm, managing director at Koch Disruptive Technologies, said in a statement.

The 20-year rep

Emanate’s bet is that speed wins. An industrial buyer can usually get the same part from multiple suppliers, so whoever answers first, with a better read on price, gets the order. The company says its software sits on top of systems suppliers already use and pulls that scattered knowledge into one place.

“Doing nothing isn’t neutral in this market,” Emanate founder and CEO Kiara Nirghin said in a statement.

Fortune previously wrote about Emanate in February, when it came out of stealth with backing from a16z, Peter Thiel, and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian. Nirghin is a Thiel Fellow, a former Google Grand Prize winner, and the youngest board member of the Google Impact Fund.

“Before Emanate, customer accounts were handled per account, by whoever owned them, with whatever that person remembered and had time for,” Nirghin told Fortune in written responses. “Now they’re handled 24/7, with a full knowledge graph of every single interaction on the account.”

She doesn’t call the product a chatbot or an agent. She calls it an engine. “You point it at a business metric, and the engine figures out the rest.

Nirghin said Emanate measures results by giving the engine to one group of accounts and comparing it with the rest of the customer’s business over the same stretch. Both groups face the same prices and demand, so the gap should be the engine’s doing.

Nirghin said the engine can autonomously reactivate, manage, price, and expand accounts. But it doesn’t start out that way. “Our model is earned autonomy,” she said. “The engine starts with a human in the loop and earns the right to act on its own, step by step, as it proves itself on an outcome.”

Asked about the worst mistake the engine has made, Nirghin said there hasn’t been one.

“Because autonomy is earned and we deploy incredibly intelligently, it has never happened,” Nirghin said.

Generative AI was used for research assistance and/or transcription for this article. The reporter independently reported and verified the factual claims in this article, and a human editor reviewed it before publication. This report has been updated with regard to Emanate’s client companies, whose agreements with Emanate are confidential.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

“I’m willing to accept no incidents of cybersecurity. We should not accept any of them,” he told Fortune in an interview in London. “We should do everything we can to avoid them.”

Earlier this month, Altman said in an interview with Vanity Fair that the world may have to accept “some bad things happening” in return for AI’s benefits, including major hacks, misuse, and scams, because people will do “orders of magnitude” more good than harm with the technology. In a subsequent interview with Politico’s Decoded podcast, Altman warned of “a coming tidal wave of cybersecurity problems” from rival open-source models, months after a swarm of OpenAI’s own agents escaped their training sandbox and hacked into the Hugging Face website.

Huang told Fortune that the incidents so far could all have been avoided with stronger containment and monitoring of AI agents. He compared the problem to the early consumer internet, when clicking on a website could infect a PC with a virus. The fix was for browsers to run websites in isolation, so they couldn’t touch the rest of the computer. Huang says AI agents need the same treatment and should be sealed inside a secure container where they can’t do damage beyond what they’re allowed access to.

Huang also shrugged off warnings of existential risks from AI that have come from many within the leading AI companies, including executives such as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, telling Fortune the technology was “completely in our control.”

“I don’t know why anybody would want to support the advancement of a technology that’s going to result, you know, in the end of human civilization as we know it. And so, if they believe that, they really ought to stop working on it,” he said.

Huang is in London as part of a European tour that kicked off in Paris on Tuesday, where he told the audience that “Europe needs to get in the race” on AI. Huang said Nvidia would announce $2 billion in new European investments within the next week. That comes on top of the $8 billion the chipmaker has already committed to the continent. The tour also includes Berlin, where Nvidia’s GTC conference will be hosted later in the month.

The region still trails at the frontier, but Huang has pitched open-source models as Europe’s best route to catching up with the U.S. Nvidia is already a major backer of Mistral, the French open-weight developer that recently released its Large 4 model, trained on 4,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs. The sovereignty pitch also suits Nvidia. Open-weight models lower costs for the companies building them, but the hardware spending still goes to the chipmaker.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Walter Cordes, 48, a lieutenant with the Sharonville Police Department, searched the Flock system 29 times between Dec. 19, 2024, and April 20, 2026, to find the person’s whereabouts for personal reasons unrelated to police work, according to the Hamilton County Prosecutor’s Office.

A grand jury indicted him Oct. 13 on one count of unauthorized use of a computer, cable or telecommunication property. The charge is a fifth-degree felony that carries up to 12 months in prison under Ohio law. Prosecutors have not identified the person Cordes allegedly tracked or said why he searched for them.

The searches came to light in June when Cordes self-reported during a department audit of the system, then admitted to them in an interview, prompting an investigation by the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office. Sharonville Police Chief Jim Nesbit told WKRC the audit turned up other improper use, which the department addressed, and that “Lt. Cordes came forward to share that he too had misused the system.” Sharonville leases 24 Flock cameras, and the department said Cordes has been placed on administrative leave while it finishes its own investigation.

“When technology is misused, it undermines public trust,” Hamilton County Prosecutor Connie Pillich said in a statement. Pillich said Cordes is the first law enforcement official her office has charged with misusing the technology since she took office.

Rich Krummen, president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 74, told FOX19 that people he’d spoken with were shocked, but added, “that’s why we have checks and balances.”

Several other cases

The case is one of several in recent weeks. In September, prosecutors in Marion County, Indiana, charged five Indianapolis police officers with misusing their access to Flock cameras. One officer allegedly looked up the location of his ex-wife’s car more than 950 times over six months. On Oct. 7, a former Joliet, Illinois, police lieutenant, Jeremy Harrison, was charged with computer tampering and official misconduct over his use of the city’s Flock system, according to FOX 32.

The charges add to pressure on Flock, an $8 billion startup backed by a16z and Tiger Global whose cameras let any police department with a contract reconstruct where a car has been. Flock told Fortune it has raised $500 million at an $8.3 billion valuation and has argued it is adding customers far faster than it loses them.

In August, two Arizona cities, Tempe and Cave Creek, ended their Flock contracts on the same day, with Cave Creek citing privacy concerns and cases of misuse. A Flock spokesperson said then that every search is logged and reviewed through the company’s Audit Assistance tool, which flags unusual activity for administrators.

Closer to Sharonville, many jurisdictions in Greater Cincinnati have halted or canceled their Flock contracts over misuse concerns, WVXU reported, including the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office, which investigated Cordes.

Flock declined to comment. An attorney for Cordes could not be reached.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Build “a continuous audio recorder.” Add “live listening” and “downloading/deleting recordings.” Encrypt the SD card. Make the USB output “power-only.” Develop “a second unit and speech-triggered recording,” then “a third unit.” Finally, “apply final protection and silence boot output.”

According to court documents unsealed Tuesday, the prompts were sent between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 from a ChatGPT account linked to the wife of Abdulrahman Alfozan, an OpenAI engineer and a Saudi national who has been a U.S. legal resident since September 2020. Prosecutors say that on or about Sept. 28, Alfozan hid a recording device behind a television in an executive conference room in one of the company’s San Francisco buildings after prompting an AI chatbot associated with his wife to build it. The complaint does not charge his wife.

The federal complaint against Alfozan does not list which chatbot Alfozan is alleged to have used to make such prompts, but OpenAI confirmed to Fortune that the chatbot was the company’s own ChatGPT. The chatbot referenced Alfozan’s personal AI chatbot account and shared unique identifiers and IP usage. But his wife’s account isn’t the only chatbot Alfozan is alleged to have used in this recording incident: About six weeks earlier, court documents say, Alfozan used a productivity agent internal to OpenAI to determine which meeting rooms had a capacity for six or more people, and which rooms would host high-powered meetings.

“How about external partners, where would those usually meet with,” Alfozan is said to have prompted the productivity agent at OpenAI, according to court documents. OpenAI has not yet responded to Fortune’s request for comment on whether the company was alerted to Alfozan’s prompts before discovering the recording device. According to an FBI agent’s affidavit in court documents, Alfozan is said to have chosen this specific conference room, after prompting the productivity agent, because meetings there would “frequently involve discussions of highly confidential technical, commercial, and strategic information, including proprietary research, product plans, and business-development opportunities.”

The affidavit also notes that the room “typically is used for internal leadership meetings … as well as external briefings with government officials and business counterparts.” Alfozan did not have authorized access to the conference room; only executives and their assistants could reserve it.

Who is Abdulrahman Alfozan, and what did he do?

Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national, was arrested Oct. 9, according to the Justice Department. He faces one count under the federal Wiretap Act, which carries up to five years in prison.

The affidavit says he used a device to intercept oral communications, but it is still unknown whether the device actually captured a conversation. When OpenAI made a forensic copy of the memory card, “none of the files on it could be recovered or decrypted,” the agent wrote.

OpenAI and the Justice Department have described the contents as encrypted; the affidavit says they “may have been.”

The rest of the case runs on cameras and logs. OpenAI had no camera in the room when the device was placed. CCTV inside the company’s offices recorded Alfozan near the room on 10 different days in September. Court documents say that on Sept. 28, the day the device’s firmware was compiled, he was near the room from 2:18 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

Staff found the device on Sept. 30, wrapped in toilet paper, tucked behind a TV in the room during a routine sweep, OpenAI told Fortune. It was a Seeed XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense, a thumb-sized board with a microphone and microSD storage, made by a Shenzhen-based company. This prompted cooperation between OpenAI and the FBI, and by Oct. 5, a camera had been placed in the room. In the photo in the complaint (and above), Alfozan was caught on video at 1:20:47 p.m. that day, checking behind the TV.

That same day, court documents say, he left a bag in a printer room. Security went through the bag and found his wallet, his ID, and a second Seeed recording board inside—which security removed from his bag. After he told the company he had lost the bag and picked it up from lost and found around noon the next day, he sent a written update inquiring about what he characterized as “stolen” items.

“A few items were stolen: one credit card, cash (~$500), 2 AirPods, 1 headphone, sunglasses, power bank.” He didn’t ask about the second recording device. CCTV then showed him that day moving items into a Target shopping bag.

According to the motion, Alfozan, his wife, and a third family member had booked one-way tickets from San Francisco to Saudi Arabia, via Istanbul, for Oct. 12. Prosecutors wrote that he “has the means—and will have an incentive—to flee the United States sooner if he learns about this case before he is arrested.” He was arrested on Oct.9, three days before his one-way flight.

What are the consequences?

The government’s cover sheet asks for no bail and lists “deportation” among possible penalties.

The complaint doesn’t charge trade-secret theft or economic espionage, and it doesn’t allege a foreign tie. But a trial attorney from the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section is assisting the prosecution, according to the Justice Department. The sealing motion also asked to let prosecutors share the files with “any other law enforcement and intelligence agencies as may be necessary for investigative purposes.”

Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton said the intelligence community is committed to protecting American intellectual property “from foreign threats.” FBI Director Kash Patel called protecting “American SI innovation” one of the bureau’s “highest counterintelligence priorities.” OpenAI said in a post on X that it had “no indications” he took model weights, source code, or customer data.

Under the Speedy Trial Act, prosecutors have 30 days from his arrest to indict him, and a grand jury can add charges. Alfozan made his initial appearance Tuesday and is due back in court Oct. 19 for a detention hearing.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

“That is a huge problem that women face, and where this is manifesting is in this thing that we call at Lean In, the broken rung,” Griswold told editorial director Kristin Stoller onstage at Fortune’s annual Most Powerful Women conference in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Tuesday. “The broken rung is one of the most entrenched problems that women face, and it’s early in their career. It’s the first promotion, from entry-level, to manager.”

The Gen Z CEO noted that only 93 entry-level women were promoted to manager for every 100 entry-level men in 2025. It may seem like a small gap, Griswold said, but it’s just the first hurdle that has a domino effect on their career success. 

“This really matters because if women—if once you don’t get that first promotion—it’s then really hard to catch up,” the Lean In leader said. “We can’t fix the problems for underrepresentation of women at the top if we can’t fix the broken rung at the bottom.”

But mending the step and leveling the playing field for women isn’t impossible. Griswold said back in 2021, nine out of 10 companies made diversity a priority. The progress nearly closed the broken rung for Black women the following year—but without sustained effort in the years since, the problem has reemerged. In 2025, only 60 Black women were promoted for every 100 men.

“These numbers were going in the wrong direction,” Griswold said. 

While women continue to face barriers to advancement, Griswold’s own career trajectory offers a glimpse into what leadership can look like when young women get the opportunity to break through. Griswold’s meteoric rise as CEO of the massive global women’s empowerment nonprofit has been anything but ordinary: The organization’s founder, former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, appointed Griswold to the top role following her brief stint as a Meta product manager. It’s extremely rare to see Gen Zers at the helm of companies—especially ones whom they didn’t found themselves. However, she said believes her age is actually an asset as CEO.

“I like to believe I’m quite fearless, which I think has treated me well in this role,” Griswold said. “And in being young, it really allows me to trust in my leadership team…for a lot of counsel and domain expertise.”

As the fresh-faced leader of Lean In, the Gen Zer believes women shouldn’t have to wait for their turn to lead. Her appointment as CEO drew a lot of attention, with critics wondering if she was too young for the job. But in response to the scrutiny, Griswold said a conversation with Sandberg illuminated double standards, and reinforced the need to change the expectations about where young women could go.

“When a young man gets a big job in our world, it’s not really that interesting, because it happens often,” the Gen Z leader said. “When a young woman gets a big job, which happened to me, it’s a little more interesting because it’s rare. And that is why I do this work: so that when women get big jobs, it won’t be something that’s surprising. It will just be a matter of fact.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com