How Leopold Aschenbrenner built a $45 billion AI hedge fund — and lost most of it in days

Two years ago, Leopold Aschenbrenner argued he was one of few people in the world who saw the future clearly. In a sprawling, 165-page essay that became required reading in Silicon Valley, the former OpenAI researcher positioned himself as a kind of prophet for the coming age of artificial super intelligence. But this week, the limits of Aschenbrenner's vision were on display when the AI-themed hedge fund he runs — named Situational Awareness, also the title of his viral June 2024 manifesto — ran into the harsh reality of tumbling semiconductor stocks and Wall Street margin calls. At its peak earlier this month, his fund sat atop $45 billion in assets. By Thursday, however, after being forced to offload all of his leveraged stock bets — including hard-hit names like SK Hynix and CoreWeave — to Ken Griffin's Citadel at a discount, the fund's holdings plunged to around $10 billion, according to people with knowledge of the situation. Before this month's decline, Situational Awareness racked up gains of more than 1,000% since inception, The Wall Street Journal reported last month. Meanwhile, critics pointed out that Aschenbrenner had no experience running money prior to launching his fund in July 2024, calling him more lucky than smart. Some noted that his early work experience was at the doomed crypto firm FTX, where he helped now-disgraced founder Sam Bankman-Fried run a charity out of a Bahamas penthouse. Others on Wall Street, including former traders at global investment banks, noted that in light of reports Situational Awareness used as much as 400% leverage, the collapse wasn't shocking. The near-collapse of Situational Awareness coincides with the hedge fund manager's wedding, set for this weekend, sources told CNBC's David Faber. Aschenbrenner is engaged to Avital Balwit, chief of staff for Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, according to a Fortune profile. By July of that year, Aschenbrenner parlayed his rising fame into seed capital for his hedge fund, raising a reported $225 million from Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and investor Daniel Gross. "Before long, the world will wake up," Aschenbrenner wrote at the time, adding that only a few hundred people in the AI community knew what was coming. "If they are seeing the future even close to correctly," he wrote, "we are in for a wild ride."