Leopold Aschenbrenner vows to ‘fight another day’ after fund plunges 67% in July
Manager of AI hedge fund Situational Awareness tells investors he will learn from ‘very expensive scars’
Hedge fund manager Leopold Aschenbrenner has vowed to “fight another day” after the recent rout in AI stocks forced the once high-flying investor into a fire sale of his fund’s assets.
In a letter to investors in his fund Situational Awareness sent late on Thursday, Aschenbrenner also said he took “full responsibility” for the events that led to a 67 per cent plunge in assets in July, and said he would make it his “mission to ensure that we learn the necessary lessons from this experience”.
The fund, which was founded in 2024 and whose assets ballooned to more than $20bn on the back of a series of aggressive bets on the AI boom, would continue to operate and would not exit public equities, he said.
But Aschenbrenner added that Situational Awareness would no longer borrow money from banks to magnify its bets.
Aschenbrenner, a former employee of OpenAI and the FTX Future Fund — the philanthropic arm of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire — compared the dynamics facing his fund to a “bank run” and said the fund saw “adverse trading in names publicly associated with us”.
Situational Awareness suffered severely in an AI rout this week when some of the biggest apparent equity holdings of the fund, including Bloom Energy and Sandisk, tumbled.
The San Francisco-based fund on Wednesday hashed out an emergency exit with Ken Griffin’s Citadel by selling the majority of its public equity holdings at a discount of more than 10 per cent, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The letter said the fund was still up 80 per cent on the year despite July’s losses, which were first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
“These were very expensive scars, but I am dedicated to ensuring they will be invaluable lessons for our organisation and for myself as we move forward,” Aschenbrenner wrote. “My core promise to you is that we will not waste the opportunity to learn from these events.”
He added: “Over the past two years, we have delivered outstanding results, despite occasional sharp pullbacks. But our fund must always be structured such that we can take a loss and fight another day.”
The letter did not disclose the fund’s latest assets under management, and many early investors are subject to lock-up agreements that mean they cannot redeem funds until at least September.
One person close to the firm said its remaining portfolio on Friday, including private investments, was worth roughly $10bn.
Situational Awareness concentrated its bets on a small number of AI-related stocks, with Aschenbrenner using borrowed funds from prime brokers to leverage his positions. He had no previous trading experience when he began investing.
A spokesperson for Situational Awareness declined to comment.