Why AI investor Leopold Aschenbrenner is selling all stocks

The battered hedge fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner is unwinding many of its trades after big losses on artificial intelligence stocks and a bad bet against software stocks left it scrambling to raise cash, according to people familiar with the matter.

The prime brokers for the fund, Situational Awareness, have been rushing to raise cash to meet margin requirements, the people said. Ken Griffin’s Citadel hedge fund reached a deal to buy the fund’s publicly traded assets, people familiar with the deal said.

Situational Awareness has sustained significant losses in recent weeks as its portfolio of AI infrastructure investments such as SK Hynix declined while short positions in software companies such as Adobe moved sharply against it, the people said.

The fund grew to as big as $45 billion at the start of July before big losses took hold, according to a person familiar.

Several of the firm’s prime brokers — including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase —have been working with the fund as it seeks to meet margin requirements or reduce positions in an orderly fashion, according to people familiar with the discussions. The brokers have been marketing a group of the firm’s holding on both the long and short side for sale prior to Thursday’s start of trading, according to people familiar with the situation.

The situation remains fluid. It couldn’t be determined whether the firm was satisfying its margin calls through the sales. The firm had been negotiating to sell its stake in Anthropic but it wasn’t clear if that deal was done. A spokesman for the firm said reports that it was marketing a stake it owns in Anthropic are not accurate.

The unwind comes at an unfortunate time for Aschenbrenner, who is getting married this weekend, two sources confirmed. Aschenbrenner is engaged to Avital Balwit, chief of staff for Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, according to an October profile in Fortune.

The turmoil is an early and potentially significant test of the investment thesis that made Aschenbrenner one of the most closely watched figures in the AI trade. The 25-year-old built the firm around the idea that increasingly powerful AI systems would require a vast expansion of chips, memory, data centers and electricity generation.

The fund’s largest holdings at the end of the first quarter included Nebius Group, Sandisk, Micron and CoreWeave, according to filings. All four of those stocks are down more than 35% this month.

Aschenbrenner became prominent in technology and investing circles after publishing a series of essays in 2024 arguing that rapid advances in artificial intelligence would require an enormous expansion of computing power, advanced semiconductors, memory and energy infrastructure. Those ideas became the intellectual foundation for Situational Awareness after he left OpenAI.

Aschenbrenner graduated from Columbia University as valedictorian at the age of 19 before joining OpenAI’s Superalignment team. He was fired in 2024 over what the company described as an improper disclosure of internal information. Aschenbrenner has disputed that characterization, saying he shared a largely nonconfidential planning document with outside researchers for feedback, and has said his dismissal followed tensions over warnings he raised about OpenAI’s security practices. OpenAI has said those concerns were unrelated to his departure. 

The investor also had a brief stint at a philanthropy-focused fund founded by FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried, according to Fortune.

The size of the fund’s losses and the amount it was seeking to raise couldn’t immediately be determined.