Days before he was set to celebrate a lavish California wedding, a 24-year-old Silicon Valley AI wunderkind saw his once-soaring $45 billion hedge fund portfolio buckle under pressure.
Leopold Aschenbrenner, founder of the artificial intelligence-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness, was preparing for his Carmel wedding this week as his investment operation began to come apart, reportedly after using heavy borrowing to fuel enormous bets on the AI boom.
The German-born investor, known in tech circles for his signature turtlenecks, built a massive $45 billion position by loading up on artificial intelligence stocks and securing a major private investment in Anthropic.
With the portfolio sliding, Aschenbrenner moved quickly to contain the damage, reaching out to some of the world’s most powerful hedge funds and offloading billions of dollars in assets to Ken Griffin’s Citadel, according to The Wall Street Journal.
In a Thursday letter to investors, Aschenbrenner said he had sold a portion of the firm’s publicly traded stock holdings and pledged to sharpen its approach to risk management “to ensure a higher level of resilience going forward.”
Even after the steep selloff, Situational Awareness continues to oversee a portfolio worth more than $10 billion.
Aschenbrenner’s sudden reversal has drawn attention in Silicon Valley precisely because his ascent was so unusually fast.
He graduated from Columbia University at 19, went on to work at Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, and later joined OpenAI in 2023, where he served on a team focused on oversight of artificial superintelligence.
He was fired roughly a year later after allegedly leaking sensitive information to the husband of an Anthropic executive.
The setback did little to slow his rise in Silicon Valley.
Aschenbrenner became an AI celebrity after publishing a 165-page essay, “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead,” which earned praise from figures including Ivanka Trump and helped attract deep-pocketed investors to his firm.
Situational Awareness focuses on investments tied to artificial general intelligence and has been backed by tech heavyweights including Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.
Dubbed the “Nostradamus of AI,” Aschenbrenner met his fiancée while the pair worked at FTX. She now serves as chief of staff to Anthropic’s CEO.
Now, instead of celebrating one of the biggest weeks of his life solely as a newlywed, the AI wunderkind is also trying to rebuild one of the most spectacular hedge fund collapses in recent memory.
