Alex Kaplan, an independent writer on X, spent September 3 assembling six years’ worth of leaks, sightings, and one mystifying print ad into a single timeline for a device he calls Dime: a silver, in-ear hardware product that a scattered rumor ecosystem keeps tying to OpenAI. Kaplan’s own framing matters here. He is not reporting a product. He is cataloguing a pattern and assigning it odds, and he says so explicitly, putting a 55 percent probability on OpenAI being behind it, 25 percent on a rival startup borrowing OpenAI’s supply chain and designer, and the rest on pure marketing theater.
What is actually documented, according to Kaplan’s account, is thinner than the rumor makes it feel. OpenAI publicly called an early leaked image “totally false” and said it was “not connected to us at all.” Cofounder Greg Brockman separately called the story fake. And in 2025, under oath, io’s hardware chief Tang Tan said the company’s first product, the one Sam Altman previewed on video, is “not an in-ear device, nor a wearable device” and remains at least a year from sale. Those three data points are on the record, from named executives, in the company’s own words or sworn testimony.
Everything else in Kaplan’s chronology is inference stacked on inference. A now-deleted X account posted unverified supply-chain claims in January about a codename, “Sweetpea,” tied to an alleged China intellectual-property filing. A now-deleted Reddit account claimed OpenAI canceled a Super Bowl ad featuring the device and actor Alexander Skarsgård. Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia was photographed at a San Francisco coffee shop with a metallic puck and protruding earbuds that onlookers assumed was the same hardware. A June print ad in Stripe Press’s magazine named the device with marketing copy, and Stripe has not disclosed who bought it. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, credited by Kaplan for tracking Apple’s supply chain in prior reporting, has separately described leaked components that sound more like a smart speaker than earbuds, which does not obviously match the earlier description at all.
None of that is confirmation. A deleted anonymous account is not a source with a track record. A photograph of a founder holding an unlabeled object is not a spec sheet. A print ad with no listed buyer is not a product announcement. Kaplan’s own tally treats his lead theory as barely better than a coin flip against two alternatives combined, which is the honest way to describe evidence this circumstantial.
The context Kaplan’s post leaves out is what OpenAI has actually confirmed: the company bought Jony Ive’s hardware studio io in 2025 and has said publicly, through Altman and now through Tan’s testimony, that a first device exists in prototype and is not ready to sell. That acquisition is real. Everything wrapped around the name Dime, the codename Sweetpea, and the string of sightings sits entirely outside anything OpenAI has confirmed, denied, or filed. Until one of the people Kaplan names as knowing the truth (Skarsgård, Gebbia, Palmer Luckey, or Stripe’s publishing team) goes on the record, or OpenAI comments beyond its existing denial, Dime stays a rumor with an unusually long paper trail rather than a product.
Readers tracking OpenAI’s hardware push should watch for an actual filing, a supply-chain teardown from a named source, or an on-record OpenAI statement, not another sighting. Absent one of those three, this story has not moved past the same denial OpenAI issued in February.
Alex Kaplan, writing on X on September 3, 2026 (https://x.com/alexkaplan0/status/2095345448496103916).
