One of the most talked-about funds in AI is wagering again, barely a week after it nearly blew up. Situational Awareness, the firm founded by Leopold Aschenbrenner, has returned to investing with a $400M bet.
The return is remarkable given what just happened. In July the fund suffered a catastrophic reversal, losing roughly two-thirds of its value in a single month and being forced to dump its holdings.
Aschenbrenner is not a typical fund manager. A former OpenAI researcher, he left in 2024 and published a 165-page essay, also called “Situational Awareness,” arguing that artificial general intelligence could arrive far sooner than most expected.
He turned that thesis into a portfolio. Backed by roughly $225m from names including the Collison brothers, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, the fund bet on the “picks and shovels” of the AI boom rather than the model makers themselves.
The strategy worked spectacularly, for a while. The fund piled into data-centre operators, memory chipmakers and power suppliers, and its assets swelled past $20bn as those bets soared, with one measure putting its return at 439%.
