AI hedge fund Situational Awareness sells public portfolio, retains Anthropic stake
The fund, founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, sold most of its public holdings after steep losses, but still holds shares in Anthropic and other private companies.
Situational Awareness, a hedge fund established by Leopold Aschenbrenner after he was fired from OpenAI for improper disclosure of internal information, has sold the majority of its public stock portfolio to Ken Griffin's Citadel. The fund had returned 439% for the year through June, but then suffered heavy losses as AI infrastructure stocks declined sharply. Among the hardest-hit holdings were memory chip makers SK Hynix and SanDisk, clean energy developer Bloom Energy, and neocloud provider Nebius Group, all dropping over 30% in the past month. Losses were amplified by leverage.
According to Bloomberg, after Citadel purchased most of the public holdings, the fund's total assets fell from about $20 billion to roughly $10 billion. However, the fund did not sell its private investments. Notably, it retains a stake in Anthropic currently valued at $5 billion. Anthropic was last valued at $965 billion in a Series H round in May and is expected to go public as soon as October, potentially at an even higher valuation. Other private holdings include chipmaker MatX and AI data center startup Fluidstack.
Aschenbrenner, in a July 24 letter to investors seen by the Financial Times, called the selloff one of the best buying opportunities since early last year and invited clients to commit fresh capital from August 1, but the appeal did not garner the expected commitments. Citadel's purchase fits its pattern of acquiring attractive assets when leveraged players are forced to unwind. Early backers of Situational Awareness included quant firm Jane Street, Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison, and Meta executives Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman.
