AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness sells public stock holdings amid large losses

Leopold Aschenbrenner's hedge fund, Situational Awareness, is disposing of its public equity holdings as it confronts sizable losses on artificial-intelligence infrastructure investments and a short position in software stocks, sources said. The fund's prime brokers, including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, have been working to raise cash to satisfy margin calls and to unwind positions in an orderly manner. A large investment firm has agreed to purchase the fund's publicly traded assets, though the buyer has not been identified.

The portfolio, which held stakes in companies such as SK Hynix, Nebius Group, Sandisk, Micron and CoreWeave, has seen declines of more than 35 % in the month, contributing to the fund's need for liquidity. Short positions in software firms, notably Adobe, moved against the fund, adding to the pressure.

Situational Awareness has also been negotiating the sale of its stake in Anthropic, but it is unclear whether that transaction has been completed. A spokesperson for the firm rejected reports that it was actively marketing the Anthropic stake.

Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI researcher who left the company in 2024, built the fund around the thesis that rapid AI advances would drive massive demand for chips, memory, data-center capacity and electricity. He gained attention after publishing essays outlining this view earlier this year. The fund’s exact loss magnitude and the amount of capital it seeks to raise have not been disclosed.