Leopold Aschenbrenner

Leopold Aschenbrenner is the founder of Situational Awareness LP, a San Francisco investment adviser to an AI-infrastructure hedge fund. His own site states that he "originally hail[s] from Germany," "did research on long-run economic growth at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute," worked "on the Superalignment team at OpenAI," and "recently founded an investment firm focused on AGI, with anchor investments from Patrick Collison, John Collison, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross."¹ The cover pages of the firm's ownership filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission give his citizenship as code 2M, the EDGAR code for Germany.²

Columbia and Oxford

Columbia University's alumni magazine announced in April 2021 that Aschenbrenner, an economics and mathematics-statistics major from Berlin, was the valedictorian of the class of 2021. It described him as a research affiliate at the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford and a cofounder of Columbia College Effective Altruism, and stated that after graduation he would be a research fellow at the Forethought Foundation.³ In the interview he said he arrived at Columbia aged 15, and listed among his courses "War, Peace, and Strategy" with Richard K. Betts and "War in Germany" with Adam Tooze.³ The Forethought Foundation was a project of the Centre for Effective Altruism, directed from October 2017 by William MacAskill.⁴ In a 2024 interview Dwarkesh Patel said the two had met "through the Tyler Cowen universe."⁵

FTX Future Fund

Cowen posted the announcement of the FTX Future Fund on Marginal Revolution on 1 March 2022. The fund planned "to distribute at least $100M this year" and might "deploy up to $1B this year"; its team was "Nick Beckstead (CEO), Leopold Aschenbrenner, Will MacAskill, and Ketan Ramakrishnan." Cowen added: "Emergent Ventures winner Leopold Aschenbrenner has been a driving force behind this, congratulations to Leopold!"⁶ Aschenbrenner later described the fund as "a foundation funded by Sam Bankman-Fried but we were our own thing. We were based in the Bay Area," and said that in November 2022 "it was revealed that Sam was a giant fraud, and from one day to the next, the whole thing collapsed."⁵ He was among the signatories of a post dated 11 November 2022 announcing that the team had resigned, which stated that "to the extent that the leadership of FTX may have engaged in deception or dishonesty, we condemn that behavior in the strongest possible terms."⁷

In 2018, through the American affiliate of the Centre for Effective Altruism, Open Philanthropy had granted 5,000,000 dollars to "create and seed a new discretionary fund that will be administered by Carl Shulman," a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute and Open Philanthropy adviser; the work Shulman said he might fund included "economic modeling of the impacts of automating different aspects of AI development."⁸ Shulman later became Aschenbrenner's co-portfolio manager.

OpenAI

Erin Woo and Stephanie Palazzolo of The Information reported on 11 April 2024, citing "a person with knowledge of the situation," that OpenAI had fired two researchers for allegedly leaking information: Aschenbrenner, "a researcher on a team dedicated to keeping artificial intelligence safe for society," and Pavel Izmailov. They described Aschenbrenner as "an ally of OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who participated in a failed effort to force out OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last fall," and wrote that "It's not clear what information the two fired staffers leaked."⁹

In a podcast interview with Patel posted on 4 June 2024, Aschenbrenner said the leak was a "brainstorming document on preparedness, safety, and security measures" that he had shared "with three external researchers for feedback," after redacting a reference to "a future cluster." He said he had earlier written an internal memo on OpenAI's security, "which I thought was egregiously insufficient to protect against the theft of model weights or key algorithmic secrets from foreign actors," shared it with "a couple of board members" after "a major security incident," and received "an official HR warning for sharing the memo with the board." He said that when he was fired "it was very made explicit that the security memo was a major reason," that a lawyer had questioned him about "whether the government should be involved in AGI, whether I and the superalignment team were loyal to the company, and what I was up to during the OpenAI board events," that he had not signed the employee letter during those events, and that he was offered equity worth "close to a million dollars" on leaving but "didn't want to sign."⁵ David Faber of CNBC wrote in July 2026 that "OpenAI has said those concerns were unrelated to his departure."¹⁰ The essay series "Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead," published under his name, is dated June 2024.¹¹

The Funds

Situational Awareness Partners LP, a Delaware partnership, filed a notice of exempt offering (Form D) on 23 September 2024 as a hedge fund relying on Rule 506(b) and the section 3(c)(7) exclusion, with a minimum investment of 5,000,000 dollars and offices at 512 2nd Street, San Francisco. Its general partner is SAF AI GP LP, whose general partner is SAF AI GP LLC, managed by Aschenbrenner, who signed the form; Nicholas Gross-Whitaker is chief operating officer.¹² Situational Awareness Offshore LP, a Cayman Islands partnership at the offices of Walkers Corporate Limited, filed on 12 December 2024 with a first sale on 1 December and 24,042,356 dollars sold to two investors.¹³ A third vehicle, "Situational Awareness LP Nov 2024 a Series of CGF2021 LLC," administered by Sydecar in Claymont, Delaware, reported 24,975,000 dollars sold to 32 investors under the section 3(c)(1) exclusion.¹⁴

The adviser registered with the SEC effective 24 February 2025 (file 801-132039, CRD 333011), after withdrawing a California exempt-reporting registration on 25 January 2025.¹⁵ Its Form ADV of 11 June 2026 reports regulatory assets under management of 9,278,344,000 dollars, all discretionary, in two accounts, and eight employees, four of them in advisory roles. The single private fund it reports is Situational Awareness Partners LP, a master fund whose feeder is the offshore partnership, which is registered with the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority. It reports the fund's gross asset value as 9,278,344,000 dollars, its beneficial owners as about 81, the share owned by the adviser and its related persons as about 4 percent and the share owned by non-United States persons as 14 percent. The auditor is KPMG in Walnut Creek, the administrator is Stone Coast Fund Services, and the prime brokers are BofA Securities Prime, Citigroup Global Markets, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Securities, with Citizens Financial Group also listed as a custodian. Schedule A lists Aschenbrenner as chief investment officer from May 2024 with ownership of 50 to 75 percent, Shulman as director of research from October 2024 with 25 to 50 percent, and Gross-Whitaker as chief operating officer from August 2024 with 5 to 10 percent, followed by chief financial officer Patrick DeGraca (January 2026) and chief compliance officer Kimberly Summe (June 2026).¹⁵

The amended Forms D record the cumulative amounts sold since the first sales. For the Delaware fund they were 997,910,000 dollars from 65 investors (signed 5 September 2025), 1,025,510,000 dollars from 66 investors (29 December 2025), 1,762,326,027 dollars from 93 investors (10 March 2026) and 4,346,004,027 dollars from 135 investors (11 September 2026). For the Cayman feeder they were 53,185,626 dollars from 10 investors (8 and 29 December 2025), 198,142,357 dollars from 15 investors (10 March 2026) and 5,184,671,655 dollars from 52 investors (11 September 2026).¹²¹³ Two further partnerships under the same general partner, SAF FSC2 LP and SAF PIC LP, filed on 12 May 2026 as venture capital funds, reporting 167,150,000 dollars from 25 investors and 50,100,000 dollars from nine, with first sales on 1 May 2026.¹⁶

Reported Positions

The adviser's quarterly holdings reports (Form 13F) list long equity positions and listed options, the latter valued at the underlying shares. The first, for 31 December 2024, listed six positions worth 254,813,765 dollars, led by Marvell Technology and followed by Vistra, Vertiv, Talen Energy, Constellation Energy and Modine. For 31 March 2025 the twelve positions totaled 1,005,567,727 dollars, led by call options on 20,237,400 shares of Intel (459,591,354 dollars), and included CoreWeave and Core Scientific. For 30 June 2025 the nine positions totaled 2,123,023,762 dollars, led by put options on a VanEck semiconductor exchange-traded fund. For 30 September 2025 there were 28 positions worth 4,138,368,748 dollars, and for 31 December 2025, 29 worth 5,516,758,344 dollars, led by Bloom Energy.¹⁷

For 31 March 2026 the report listed 42 positions worth 13,676,657,577 dollars, of which the five largest were put options: on the VanEck semiconductor fund (2,042,716,860 dollars), Nvidia (1,568,257,120 dollars), Oracle (1,072,873,230 dollars), Broadcom (1,006,247,961 dollars) and Advanced Micro Devices (969,160,863 dollars); there were also puts on Micron, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and ASML, and long positions in bitcoin-mining and data-center companies including IREN, Core Scientific, Riot Platforms, CleanSpark and Applied Digital. The same report was filed under the Delaware fund's own registration. The report for 30 June 2026, signed by Summe, listed 26 positions worth 20,242,292,228 dollars, almost all long: SanDisk (5,673,738,513 dollars), Micron Technology (5,573,819,392 dollars), Bloom Energy, Taiwan Semiconductor, Nebius Group, CoreWeave and Core Scientific.¹⁷¹⁸

Core Scientific, Nebius and SharonAI

A Schedule 13D filed on 19 August 2025 reported that the Delaware fund held 17,682,918 shares of Core Scientific (5.8 percent), bought for 213,190,431.12 dollars, "for investment purposes." The reporting persons were the adviser, SAF AI GP LP, Situational Awareness LLC, the fund, Aschenbrenner, "the managing partner and control person of Adviser and General Partner," and Shulman, "the co-portfolio manager of the Fund"; both men signed the joint filing agreement. The filing reserved the right to recommend "mergers, consolidations, sales or acquisitions of assets, changes in control." Counsel was Anthony J. Caldwell of Shartsis Friese. An amendment of 14 October 2025 reported 28,756,478 shares (9.4 percent), bought for 362,121,757.59 dollars.² In the proxy statement for Core Scientific's proposed acquisition by CoreWeave, filed on 26 September 2025, the adviser appears among the holders of more than 5 percent, alongside the Vanguard Group, BlackRock, Two Seas Capital and G1 Execution Services.¹⁹

The adviser reported 12,410,060 Class A shares of Nebius Group (5.6 percent) on a Schedule 13G for 19 May 2026.²⁰ In June 2026 the fund bought shares of SharonAI Holdings under a securities purchase agreement with a prefunded warrant at 0.0001 dollars a share, capped at 19.99 percent until shareholders approved the issuance on 27 August 2026; the next day the reporting persons filed a Schedule 13D for 8,070,950 shares (21.1 percent), bought for 523,882,863.18 dollars, stating an investment purpose. The fund exercised the rest of the warrant on 15 September 2026.²⁰

July and August 2026

Faber reported on 30 July 2026, citing people familiar with the matter, that the fund "was forced to sell all of its public stock holdings" after losses on AI infrastructure investments "such as SK Hynix" and on "short positions in software companies such as Adobe," that it had grown to "as big as $45 billion at the start of July," and that "Ken Griffin's Citadel hedge fund reached a deal to buy the fund's publicly traded assets." He wrote that prime brokers including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase had been "working with the fund as it seeks to meet margin requirements," that "The firm had been negotiating to sell its stake in Anthropic," and that a spokesman "said reports that it was marketing a stake it owns in Anthropic are not accurate." Citing a Fortune profile, he reported that Aschenbrenner was engaged to Avital Balwit, chief of staff to Anthropic's chief executive, Dario Amodei.¹⁰

A second amendment to the Core Scientific Schedule 13D, filed on 4 August 2026 by Adriana Schwartz of Seward & Kissel, reported 25,608,473 shares (8.1 percent) on 15 July and 14,089,395 shares (4.4 percent) on 4 August. Its schedule of transactions lists two sales on 3 August 2026 of 5,759,539 shares each, at 19.6896 and 19.4807 dollars, "sold through block trades with unaffiliated third parties."²¹ The SharonAI Schedule 13D followed on 28 August, and the amended Forms D, reporting the cumulative 4.35 billion and 5.18 billion dollars sold, were signed on 11 September 2026.¹²¹³²⁰