Leopold Aschenbrenner was a 24-year-old OpenAI researcher when he started his AI fund Situational Awareness. Now it's ballooned past $20 billion, and quant powerhouse Jane Street has thrown in money — a rare move for the notoriously secretive firm.
After fees, the fund is up 270% this year and over 1,000% since inception. Its biggest win? A stake in Anthropic that now accounts for a fifth of assets. The valuation on that bet went from $61.5 billion at first close in February to $965 billion today — a mind-boggling leap.
The ride hasn't been smooth. Early this year, Chinese startup DeepSeek released a cheap model that triggered a selloff in chip stocks, temporarily wiping out gains. But the subsequent boom in demand for compute and power infrastructure reversed the slide, and the fund ended the year up 200%.
Aschenbrenner's moves are closely watched. Retail investors treat his quarterly 13F filings as market signals, and a copy-trading service called Autopilot launched a one-click "copy Aschenbrenner" feature in March. In May, disclosure of a position in solar manufacturer T1 Energy sent the stock soaring 23% in a day.
Beyond public markets, Situational Awareness co-led a round into AI chip startup MatX alongside Jane Street and participated in AI cloud provider Fluidstack's latest financing. To manage the growing pile of assets, the fund recently hired Goldman Sachs's former head Niki Webster to run investor relations and Citadel's ex-trader Sven Khatri to oversee capital strategy.