Situational Awareness sold its public stocks, but kept its Anthropic stake

Situational Awareness sold the bulk of its public holdings to Citadel following a sharp monthlong decline, The Wall Street Journal reported. It’s a striking reversal for Aschenbrenner, a 25-year-old who had no prior trading experience before launching the fund in 2024. He built his reputation on essays arguing that scaling AI would require a massive build-out of semiconductors, compute, memory, and energy infrastructure. He had joined OpenAI’s “superalignment” team in 2023 — two years after graduating as valedictorian from Columbia at 19 — but was dismissed a year later over what the company described as improper disclosure of internal information.

The fund’s early run was extraordinary: it returned 439% for the year through June, according to the Financial Times, with assets under management reportedly reaching as much as $45 billion at their peak before positions began dropping sharply as AI infrastructure investment broadly declined, CNBC reported. Some of the hardest-hit holdings — memory-chip makers SK Hynix and Sandisk, clean-energy developer Bloom Energy, and neocloud provider Nebius Group — each fell by more than 30% over the past month, as investors grew concerned that heavy capital spending wasn’t translating into near-term revenue. Leverage amplified the losses. Even so, in a July 24 letter to investors seen by the FT, Aschenbrenner called the selloff one of the best buying opportunities since early last year, though the appeal for fresh capital reportedly didn’t draw the commitments he’d hoped for, according to Bloomberg.

After the Citadel sale, the fund’s overall assets fell to roughly $10 billion, down from around $20 billion in recent months, Bloomberg reported.

Situational Awareness did not sell its private-company investments, according to multiple reports. It continues to hold a stake in Anthropic now valued at $5 billion, per Bloomberg — a stake many would view as still appreciating, given 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, which was reportedly in talks in April to raise a new round at an $18 billion valuation.

Why it matters

A sale of private stakes like Anthropic’s could offset some of the fund’s public-market losses, underscoring how exposure to a handful of marquee AI private companies is increasingly cushioning even hedge funds hit hard by the broader AI infrastructure pullback.