OpenAI’s supposedly ‘leaked’ Super Bowl ad with ear buds and a shiny orb was a hoax

OpenAI president Greg Brockman commented on X with a tweet calling the story “fake news,” and OpenAI spokesperson Lindsay McCallum Rémy wrote, “this is totally fake.”

Looking at it carefully, the fact that the account that “found” the advertisement is brand new was remarkably convenient. The “wineheda” Reddit account behind the original post is now deleted, but a search through the Internet Archive reveals that just a year ago, the person behind it was looking to grow their business as a bookkeeper in Santa Monica — it would be quite a career shift to suddenly become someone working on ads for OpenAI and Jony Ive in time for Super Bowl LX.

Whoever was behind this hoax had been working on it for some time and approached spreading their story on multiple fronts. Max Weinbach tweeted screenshots of an email he’d received a week ago proposing promotion of a tweet about an OpenAI hardware teaser ad featuring Alexander Skarsgård, which apparently came with a real $1,146.12 payment. And AdAge reporter Gillian Follett tweeted earlier today about a “fake headline” attributed to her, falsely portraying a story about OpenAI changing its Super Bowl ad, while OpenAI CMO Kate Rouch mentioned an “entire fake website” trying to back up the same thing.