Leopold Aschenbrenner’s hedge fund Situational Awareness just did the financial equivalent of selling the furniture to keep the house. The AI-centric fund unloaded the majority of its leveraged public equity holdings to Citadel, Ken Griffin’s trading powerhouse, in a deal that closed on or around July 30, 2026.
The fund kept its crown jewel: a significant stake in Anthropic, the AI safety company whose valuation has ballooned to roughly $965 billion. That position alone accounts for approximately 20% of the fund’s total assets, or about $4 billion.
What happened and why it matters
Situational Awareness manages approximately $20 billion in assets. The fund had built up substantial leveraged positions in publicly traded AI stocks, a strategy that works beautifully on the way up and rather less beautifully on the way down.
Citadel stepped in after what’s described as a brief bidding process. The deal allowed Situational Awareness to shed its most vulnerable positions, the leveraged public equity holdings, while retaining two categories of assets: its unlevered client-funded public positions and its private investments.
