Situational Awareness LP is a hedge fund founded by Leopold Aschenbrenner, the former OpenAI Superalignment researcher who in June 2024 published the influential 165-page essay 'Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead', arguing that artificial general intelligence will arrive this decade. The fund operationalizes that thesis through public-market equity positions.
Rather than betting directly on the AI model labs, Situational Awareness invests in the infrastructure bottlenecks of the AI buildout: power-generation utilities, semiconductor manufacturers, data-storage providers, and Bitcoin mining companies pivoting to AI compute. The thesis treats electricity and silicon as the scarce inputs of the AGI era.
According to Fortune, the fund grew from roughly $1B to $1.5B AUM in its first year, with more recent 13F filings showing US equity exposure of approximately $5.5B across nearly 30 holdings as of early 2026. Backers reportedly include Patrick and John Collison, Daniel Gross, and Nat Friedman.
The fund is headquartered in San Francisco. Aschenbrenner, born in Germany around 2001-2002, was dismissed from OpenAI in April 2024 over an alleged information leak that he disputes, and launched the fund shortly after publishing his essay. As a hedge fund, Situational Awareness is not open to retail investors and is structured for accredited and qualified institutional capital.