Leopold Aschenbrenner Built a Hot A.I. Hedge Fund. Then it Melted Down.

Last year, Leopold Aschenbrenner, a man barely of legal drinking age with a fondness for Rubik’s Cubes, crisscrossed the nation to raise money for his high-flying hedge fund.

An ex-researcher at OpenAI, who departed there in a cloud of controversy and then wrote a viral essay predicting an artificial intelligence revolution, Mr. Aschenbrenner had started his fund, Situational Awareness, in 2024 at age 22 with a burst of attention. That November, he raised $100 million from big names in the tech world and immediately began going whole hog into A.I. investing.

From an office in the Bay Area that he shared with a podcast studio, he poured money into fledgling start-ups, chipmakers and data center companies — pretty much anything that could even vaguely benefit from the A.I. boom. The fund began reporting staggeringly high investment returns, quadrupling its investor money in mere months. It borrowed huge sums — tens of billions of dollars — from Wall Street banks to make ever-bigger bets.

When this star of San Francisco arrived in New York during his fund-raising tour around last summer, however, he received a relatively cool reception, according to three people from whom he tried to raise money, who declined to be identified talking about a private fund. They said they viewed him as a lightweight and a one-hit wonder. The asset management colossus Blackstone, the world’s largest investor in hedge funds, passed on investing, according to two of those people.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/business/situational-awareness-leopold-aschenbrenner.html