AI hedge fund Situational Awareness may have sold its public portfolio, but it still has its Anthropic shares
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- Situational Awareness sold the majority of its public stock portfolio to Citadel following steep losses over the past month, with assets under management falling from a peak of roughly $45 billion to about $10 billion after the deal
- Leopold Aschenbrenner — a 25-year-old former OpenAI superalignment team member dismissed in 2024 for improper disclosure — had no prior trading experience before launching the fund in 2024, which returned 439% through June before reversing
- Anthropic remains the fund's most valuable holding, with a stake currently valued at $5 billion after the company's $965 billion Series H round in May and a potential IPO as soon as October
- SK Hynix, SanDisk, Bloom Energy, and Nebius Group were among the hardest-hit positions, each plunging more than 30% in the past month as AI infrastructure equities sold off on concerns that massive capex wasn't translating into near-term revenue
- Citadel's purchase fits a familiar pattern for Ken Griffin's firm, which has a reputation for stepping in to buy attractive assets when leveraged players are forced to unwind, and Citadel already held some of the same AI infrastructure bets
- Aschenbrenner told investors in a July 24 letter that the selloff was one of the best buying opportunities since early last year and invited fresh capital commitments starting August 1, but the appeal did not garner the commitments he hoped for
- Other private holdings the fund retained include chipmaker MatX and AI data center startup Fluidstack, which was reportedly in talks in April to raise a new round at an $18 billion valuation
Why it matters: The fund's leveraged public-market positions — concentrated in AI infrastructure names — collapsed as capex skeptics drove a 30%+ selloff in stocks like SK Hynix and Nebius, forcing Citadel to absorb roughly half of what had been a $20 billion portfolio. The private Anthropic stake, now worth $5 billion against that backdrop, gives Aschenbrenner a potential windfall from an October IPO that could materially offset the public-side carnage.
