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Leopold Aschenbrenner has attracted a cult following online, with fans dissecting his every move

Leopold Aschenbrenner’s forecasts about the future of artificial intelligence earned him a cult following on the internet, where his investment firm’s routine regulatory filings are studied like scripture.

The parabolic performance of his hedge fund has given the 24-year-old Aschenbrenner a fan club on Wall Street, too.

Aschenbrenner had no professional investing experience when he launched his AI-focused firm, Situational Awareness, less than two years ago, with a few hundred million dollars.

Prescient stock picks and whooshes of inflows have vaulted its assets under management to more than $20 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, approaching the size of Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square and Dan Loeb’s Third Point.

Situational Awareness has gained about 270% after fees this year through May and is up more than 1,000% after fees since inception, one of the people said. One of the fund’s most successful bets is a stake in Anthropic that today accounts for about one-fifth of its assets, the person said.

Its investors now include Jane Street, the savvy quant-trading firm that ranks among Wall Street’s most profitable, some of the people said. Jane Street’s investment in Situational Awareness is particularly notable because the firm rarely allocates capital to outside money managers.

In each market mania, new celebrity stock pickers get anointed, from Ryan Jacob and his Internet Fund during the dot-com era to Cathie Wood and her ARK Innovation ETF during the pandemic rally of 2020. No portfolio manager picking the winners from AI’s advances across the economy gets attention quite like Aschenbrenner, despite the fact that he eschews public appearances and rarely posts on X.

Like other investors managing at least $100 million, Situational Awareness is required to file once-a-quarter snapshots, with a lag, of its portfolio of long positions in U.S. stocks and options. Aschenbrenner’s filings are treated as blockbuster events on social media, with devotees counting down the days until the next release. Autopilot, the trading app attached to the viral Nancy Pelosi stock tracker, rolled out an option that lets users copy Aschenbrenner’s disclosed trades in March.

News in May that Situational Awareness took a stake in T1 Energy helped send shares in the solar manufacturer up 23% in a day when it recorded its second-highest trading volume ever. TBPN, the hit tech-industry talk show, opened its May 18 episode with a roughly two-minute discussion on the verdict in the Elon Musk-OpenAI trial, followed by a conversation on Situational Awareness’s latest disclosure over five times longer. (News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.)

“We have not seen this level of attention on a hedge fund’s filings in a very long time,” said TBPN co-host John Coogan.

The commentary about Aschenbrenner can sound breathless. Podcaster Tim Ferriss called him the “Nostradamus of AI” and “as close to clairvoyant as you could possibly be” for his hit rate on AI predictions. A temporary panic flared up in May when many observers misread options activity on a filing and concluded Aschenbrenner turned bearish. “The Best AI Investor Just Shorted the Entire Market” is how one podcast put it in the title of an episode that racked up over 100,000 views on YouTube.

A native of Germany, Aschenbrenner graduated from Columbia University as the 2021 class valedictorian and briefly worked as a researcher at OpenAI. He rose to prominence with a 2024 essay, called “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead,” that foresaw the path of AI’s development by “counting the OOMs,” or the orders of magnitude by which computing power, algorithmic efficiencies and model fixes are expected to improve each year. Michael Dell, Ivanka Trump and many others shared the 165-page paper with their online followers.

Later that year, Aschenbrenner launched his hedge-fund firm, which he described as a “brain trust on AI,” with Carl Shulman, another AI intellectual who once worked at Peter Thiel’s macro hedge fund. Early backers included Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison, as well as Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, who are both currently helping lead Meta Platform’s AI efforts.

Situational Awareness lost money in early 2025 after the release of a low-cost AI model from Chinese startup DeepSeek prompted a selloff in Nvidia and other AI-adjacent stocks. It quickly recovered when demand for AI tools accelerated and sparked a rally in chip makers, manufacturers of power equipment and other providers of AI infrastructure. Situational Awareness ended 2025 up about 200%, one of the people said.

Hedge funds’ U.S. regulatory disclosures omit foreign stocks and ownership of private companies, categories that include some of Situational Awareness’s most profitable positions including Anthropic. It first invested in SK Hynix in November 2024, riding the run-up in Korean memory-chip maker over the past year that placed it into the trillion-dollar club. (The stock has given back some gains in recent days.)

The firm first invested in Anthropic in a February 2025 funding round that valued it at $61.5 billion. Now, Anthropic is valued at $965 billion.

Jane Street has invested alongside Situational Awareness in venture deals in addition to allocating to its hedge fund. The two firms were the lead investors in a February round for MatX, an upstart AI chip maker, and are investing in a new round for Fluidstack, a provider of AI cloud computing.

As Aschenbrenner’s firm expanded, it added more senior Wall Street veterans to its ranks of young AI researchers. Niki Webster, who spent nearly a decade at Goldman’s prime-brokerage division, is now the firm’s head of investor relations. Sven Khatri, who did stints at Citadel and Goldman, recently joined to head treasury strategy.