Prodigy Fund Manager's $45B Empire Collapses to $10B — But His Anthropic Bet Remains Intact

Leopold Aschenbrenner, a 25-year-old former OpenAI researcher with no prior trading background, launched Situational Awareness in 2024 on the strength of a compelling and highly public investment thesis: that the scaling of artificial intelligence would demand enormous investments in semiconductors, computing infrastructure, memory chips, and clean energy. The fund attracted serious institutional backers, including quant-trading giant Jane Street, Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison, and tech executives Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman of Meta. At its peak, the fund reportedly swelled to $45 billion in assets under management — a staggering figure for a debut fund run by someone who had never traded professionally before.

Aschenbrenner's background is anything but ordinary. He enrolled at Columbia University at age 15 and graduated as valedictorian at 19, subsequently joining OpenAI's experimental 'superalignment' team in 2023. That team, originally led by co-founder Ilya Sutskever and researcher Jan Leike, was tasked with ensuring AI systems remained aligned with human values at scale. Aschenbrenner was dismissed from OpenAI in 2024, with the company citing an improper disclosure of internal information. The fallout scattered that team across the AI landscape — Sutskever went on to found Safe Superintelligence, Leike joined Anthropic, and Aschenbrenner launched his hedge fund.

For most of its first year, Situational Awareness appeared to be a runaway success. The fund reportedly returned 439% through June 2025, according to the Financial Times, riding a wave of enthusiasm around AI infrastructure stocks. But conditions shifted sharply as public market investors grew skeptical that the massive capital expenditures pouring into AI hardware were generating near-term revenue. Stocks at the core of the fund's thesis — including memory chip makers SK Hynix and Sandisk, clean energy provider Bloom Energy, and neocloud operator Nebius Group — each dropped by more than 30% over a single month. The fund's use of leverage amplified those losses considerably.

Rather than quietly reducing exposure, Aschenbrenner doubled down in a July 24 investor letter, calling the downturn one of the best buying opportunities since early 2024 and soliciting fresh capital commitments beginning August 1. According to Bloomberg, that appeal failed to generate the inflows he had anticipated. The fund ultimately offloaded the bulk of its public equity positions to Ken Griffin's Citadel — a firm well-known for acquiring distressed or leveraged holdings at opportunistic prices — after which Situational Awareness' total assets fell from approximately $20 billion to around $10 billion.

Critically, the fire sale did not include the fund's private holdings. Situational Awareness retains a stake in Anthropic currently valued at approximately $5 billion, a position many analysts view as the fund's most significant remaining asset. Anthropic was last valued at $65 billion following a Series H funding round in May, with reports suggesting the company could pursue an IPO as early as October at an even higher valuation. If that offering materializes at favorable terms, the resulting windfall could substantially offset the losses Situational Awareness incurred in public markets. The fund also holds private positions in chipmaker MatX and AI data center startup Fluidstack, which was reportedly exploring a new funding round at an $18 billion valuation earlier this year.