Have you heard of Leopold Aschenbrenner?
One of the hottest names in today’s AI investment circle—he’s just 24 years old, and his fund, Situational Awareness LP, had public holdings of only $225 million in Q4 2024, but last month’s Q4 2025 filing revealed that this figure has surged to $5.5 billion.
Few know that Leopold Aschenbrenner was once part of the crypto world—he worked with the FTX Future Fund team under FTX until its collapse and bankruptcy.
AI genius from a family of doctors
Leopold Aschenbrenner was born in Germany to parents who are both doctors.
In 2021, 19-year-old Leopold Aschenbrenner graduated from Columbia University as valedictorian with dual degrees in economics and mathematical statistics. While at Columbia, Leopold Aschenbrenner co-founded the university’s Effective Altruism (EA) chapter.
“Effective altruism” was a principle long championed by FTX founder SBF. Perhaps motivated by shared ideals, Leopold Aschenbrenner joined the FTX Future Fund team in February 2022—a charitable initiative established by the FTX Foundation to advance effective altruism—where he worked until just before FTX’s collapse in November 2022.
In 2023, Leopold Aschenbrenner, who left FTX, joined OpenAI, now a leading AI company, and entered the Superalignment team co-led by experts Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, which is focused on technological breakthroughs to guide and control artificial intelligence systems smarter than humans.
In April 2023, OpenAI’s internal communication system was hacked, but the company did not publicly disclose the incident. Leopold Aschenbrenner subsequently submitted a memo to OpenAI’s board, arguing that OpenAI’s security measures were inadequate. Leopold Aschenbrenner later stated that this memo caused a rift between the board and management over security issues, and that he received a warning from human resources.
In April 2024, OpenAI terminated Leopold Aschenbrenner over alleged information leaks, but Aschenbrenner countered that the so-called “leak” referred only to his sharing of a brainstorming document with three external researchers to solicit feedback. OpenAI claimed the termination was unrelated to Aschenbrenner’s prior security memo, yet Aschenbrenner stated he was explicitly told that the memo was the primary reason for his dismissal. Just one month later, the Superalignment team was disbanded, and other prominent AI researchers, including Ilya Sutskever, also left OpenAI.
Interestingly, Leopold Aschenbrenner’s disputes with OpenAI are not isolated—his fiancée, Avital Balwit, is now the Chief of Staff at Anthropic, OpenAI’s largest competitor... and FTX was also one of Anthropic’s early major investors.
Leave the tech frontlines and enter the investment world
In June 2024, Leopold Aschenbrenner, just two months after leaving OpenAI, wrote a 165-page superpaper titled "Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead." The paper includes multiple chapters predicting the emergence of artificial general intelligence (AGI), outlining a path from AGI to superintelligence, describing four major risks facing humanity, detailing human strategies for responding to superintelligence, and articulating the principles of "AGI realism."
The article "Situational Awareness: The Next Decade" sparked widespread discussion in Silicon Valley, greatly enhancing Leopold Aschenbrenner's reputation. In September 2024, Leopold Aschenbrenner founded Situational Awareness LP, the fund named after the paper, and serves as its Chief Investment Officer, focusing on investment opportunities across the AI supply chain.
There is no publicly available information on the initial fund size of Situational Awareness LP; however, according to reports from mainstream media outlets such as WSJ and Fortune in mid-2025, the fund’s total assets under management at that time were approximately $1.5 billion, with LPs including Stripe co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and prominent investor Daniel Gross.
According to the 13F filing disclosed by Situational Awareness LP (a quarterly disclosure required by the SEC for investment managers with assets under management exceeding $1 billion), as of Q4 2024, the total value of Situational Awareness LP’s public holdings was “merely” $255 million. In the newly disclosed Q4 2025 holdings filed on February 16 of this year, that figure has surged to an extraordinary $5.5 billion.
Given that Situational Awareness LP was established only shortly before Q4 2024, the fund likely still had some remaining capital beyond its disclosed $2.55 billion position. However, even starting from an estimated AUM of around $1.5 billion in mid-2025, the disclosed positions had already grown to $5.5 billion by Q4 of the same year—an astonishing pace.
Position Analysis: Still Shows Traces of Crypto Circle Influence
Situational Awareness LP disclosed its top 29 holdings in the 13F filing; details are shown in the chart below.
As shown, Situational Awareness LP's bet on AI is not focused on the more publicly hyped application side, but rather on the upstream infrastructure supply chain.
The top ten holdings of Situational Awareness LP account for as much as 86%, reflecting a highly concentrated strategy focused primarily on energy, computing power, optical communications, and storage sectors.
· Maximum Position: Bloom Energy specializes in R&D for solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC) and solid oxide electrolyzers (SOEC). Driven by growing demand from AI data centers, the company has consistently exceeded earnings expectations, with its stock price rising more than tenfold since the end of 2024.
Major popular assets such as Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google do not appear in the holdings, suggesting that Situational Awareness LP prefers relatively less mainstream assets.
· Situational Awareness LP's only disclosed short position is a put option on Infosys, an Indian software services exporter, seemingly betting that the development of Claude Code and Codex will replace traditional IT outsourcing work.
Another clue tied to the crypto world is that the holdings of Situational Awareness LP include several Bitcoin mining companies, such as Core Scientific, Cipher Mining, Iren (formerly Iris Energy), and Bitdeer, founded by Wu Jihann.
Unfortunately, Situational Awareness LP is clearly not betting on these companies’ direct cryptocurrency-related businesses, but rather on the transition of mining firms into AI computing centers. Amid the growing AI trend and a sluggish crypto market, an increasing number of mining companies are proactively transforming by leveraging their existing advantages in land, computing power, and electricity. Stay tuned—we’ll be publishing another article on this trend soon.
The fork in the road of fate, the reconstruction of belief
Looking back at Leopold Aschenbrenner’s career, it’s hard not to be reminded of another once-celebrated teenage prodigy, SBF—both worked at FTX, both firmly believed in effective altruism, and both delivered remarkable investment results. But after one misstep, SBF is now behind bars, facing decades of imprisonment ahead; in contrast, Leopold Aschenbrenner’s life took a different path following FTX’s sudden collapse—but fortunately, it appears to be one better suited to him.
Time never turns back, and fate never gives anyone a second chance. Some are forever left in the ruins of the old era, while others are forced off their original paths—but uncover a brand-new story.
As a member of the crypto industry, what comes to mind is this: the sector is now at a pivotal moment of disruption and renewal, perhaps the most uncertain since its inception—some are walking away in disappointment, others are hesitantly watching, but some are actively embracing new technological waves and narrative shifts. History often unfolds this way: when old stories collapse, new ones are born. Rebuilding belief is, in itself, another kind of opportunity.