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We Are Experiencing a Situational Awareness Meltdown
Back in 2024, former OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner captured everyone's attention with a 135-page essay/manifesto mapping out the future of artificial intelligence. Then he put his money where his mouth was, starting an investment firm specifically to bet on where he saw the world moving. Now he's pretty much just got his mouth left.
Situational Awareness , Aschenbrenner's firm with the same name as his essay, was forced to sell off the majority of its public positions after suffering some major losses over the last few weeks, according to a report from CNBC .
The reported cause for the sell-off was Aschenbrenner getting it from both sides. According to CNBC, Aschenbrenner had big positions in AI infrastructure companies like SK Hynix, which have been taking a beating in the last month or so. At the same time, his firm was holding on to short positions against software giants like Adobe, betting that they'd see their market squeezed by emerging AI tools. Turns out, nope. Adobe, for example, is up more than 30% in the last month, and the payments were apparently coming due.
Seems like the exact kind of spot that someone who was being situationally aware wouldn't find themselves in!
Situational Awareness reportedly had about $45 billion in assets under its roof at the start of July, and reportedly finished 2025 up 2,000% . Now it's reportedly lost some zeros on that figure as the fund sold off nearly everything to Ken Griffin’s Citadel—perhaps best known to the general public at this point as the firm that may or may not have pushed Robinhood to restrict trading on GameStop during the great meme stock madness of 2021.
It does seem Situational Awareness had some other buyers willing to buy up Aschenbrenner's bad positions, but wanted to move as fast as possible to minimize losses, per the Financial Times , and went with Citadel. Looks like a good bet for Citadel so far, since a bunch of Situational Awareness' holdings seemed to have rallied on Thursday .
Aschenbrenner's strategy may have crashed and burned, but he's probably going to make out just fine. While he had to sell off almost all of his public positions, he's reportedly still got a whole bunch of holdings in private companies, according to Business Insider —including shares of Anthropic, which is looking to go public later this year. He's also reportedly engaged to Avital Balwit, the chief of staff to the CEO at Anthropic, so they'll get to double-dip there.
You'd hope an experience like that would humble a person, but when you're a 25-year-old who is probably going to end up a billionaire anyway, situational awareness is not really a priority.
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