Situational Awareness

Situational Awareness is an AI-focused investment firm founded in 2024 by Leopold Aschenbrenner, the German-born former OpenAI superalignment researcher who published the Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead essays in June 2024, weeks after leaving OpenAI. The fund was set up to express the essays' AGI thesis in markets, initially backed by Patrick and John Collison, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross and Jane Street. Carl Shulman joined as director of research in 2025.

The fund scaled from a few hundred million dollars at launch to roughly $20 billion in assets in under two years. US 13F filings show its reported public-equity book growing from $255m at the end of 2024 to $13.7bn across 42 positions by Q1 2026 — latterly including put positions against semiconductor and enterprise-software names — alongside private stakes in Anthropic, FluidStack, MatX and Sharon AI. The Financial Times reported a 439% net return for the first half of 2026.

July 2026 reversed the run. Reportedly levered 4–5x into AI-infrastructure positions, the fund lost about 67% of its capital in a month as longs such as SanDisk and Bloom Energy fell 30–40% while some software shorts rose against it. Facing margin calls, on 30 July it sold the bulk of its public book to Citadel in a single block at a discount of more than 10%, repaid its lenders and eliminated all leverage.

The firm kept its roughly $3.5bn Anthropic stake, its other private holdings and a smaller, fully paid-for public portfolio — leaving it still up about 80% for 2026 — and reopened to new capital from 1 August.