OpenAI moved quickly on Sunday evening to refute an online rumor that it had at the eleventh hour dropped plans to air an advertisement for a forthcoming AI hardware device during the Super Bowl. The company pushed back after a social post and a short video circulated online claiming the ad had been pulled.
OpenAI president Greg Brockman responded to the claims on X, describing the report as "fake news" in a direct comment on the social thread that spread the story. The original allegation began on Reddit, where a now-deleted post claimed to come from a disgruntled employee who said the startup decided not to proceed with a commercial starring actor Alexander Skarsgard alongside the company s not-yet-released AI device.
The poster attached a video presented as the advertisement. That clip shows Skarsgard interacting with a small metallic, circular object that the video called "dime." OpenAI s head of communications, Lindsay McCallum Remy, also weighed in on the matter by describing the circulated video as "totally fake."
Separately, OpenAI did run an advertisement during the Super Bowl, but the material that aired promoted its Codex AI coding agent rather than the device depicted in the alleged leak.
The company is developing a standalone AI device in collaboration with former Apple designer Jony Ive. OpenAI has previously set the device release window for 2026-2027. The rumor and the fake clip attracted attention amid those ongoing development plans.
Context and implications
The incident highlights two concurrent developments reported by the company: the airing of a Codex-focused Super Bowl spot and ongoing work on a hardware product with a multi-year release timeline. Company leaders publicly rejected the Reddit-originated assertion that an advertisement for the hardware had been pulled.
Because the Reddit thread was deleted and the leaked video has been called fake by OpenAI representatives, important questions about the provenance of the clip remain unresolved in public reporting.
The episode underscores how quickly unverified material can spread on social platforms and how companies may move to publicly correct misinformation while continuing longer-term product development plans.