Leopold Aschenbrenner’s hedge fund Situational Awareness LP has crossed $20 billion in assets under management, making it one of the fastest-growing investment firms in Wall Street history.
The fund gained approximately 270% after fees in 2026 through May and has returned over 1,000% since its launch less than two years ago, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal.
Aschenbrenner founded Situational Awareness LP in 2024 after leaving OpenAI’s Superalignment team, where he worked on long-term AI safety research. He named the fund after his 165-page essay “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead,” which predicted the emergence of artificial general intelligence, mapped the path from AGI to superintelligence, and outlined the economic infrastructure needed to support it.
He took to X to launch the essay:
Virtually nobody is pricing in what's coming in AI.
I wrote an essay series on the AGI strategic picture: from the trendlines in deep learning and counting the OOMs, to the international situation and The Project.
SITUATIONAL AWARENESS: The Decade Ahead pic.twitter.com/8NWDkTprj5
— Leopold Aschenbrenner (@leopoldasch) June 4, 2024
The essay circulated widely in AI and investment circles and earned him the nickname the “Nostradamus of AI,” a label endorsed by prominent figures including podcaster Tim Ferriss. He entered Columbia University at age 15 and graduated as valedictorian before joining OpenAI.
The fund launched with a few hundred million dollars in backing from Patrick and John Collison, Daniel Gross, and Nat Friedman. Jane Street, the secretive trading firm that rarely backs external managers, also invested. The strategy centers on global stocks positioned to benefit from AI infrastructure buildout, semiconductors, data centers, and power companies, offset by shorts in industries likely to lag the transition.
The fund’s single most consequential bet was an early stake in Anthropic, purchased in February 2025 when the company carried a valuation of approximately $60 billion. By May 2026, a fresh funding round had pushed Anthropic’s valuation to approximately $965 billion. That single position now represents roughly 20% of the fund’s total assets.
Situational Awareness LP now approaches the scale of established firms like Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square and Dan Loeb’s Third Point, an extraordinary trajectory for a fund barely 18 months old.
You can read the essay here.
