{"id":97235,"date":"2026-05-19T18:35:59","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T15:35:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/?p=97235"},"modified":"2026-05-19T18:42:02","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T15:42:02","slug":"aschenbrenners-picks-and-shovels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/aschenbrenners-picks-and-shovels\/","title":{"rendered":"Aschenbrenner\u2019s picks and shovels"},"content":{"rendered":"

In May 2026 many traders awaited the quarterly Form 13F<\/a> from the hedge fund Situational Awareness \u2014 its founder, Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI employee, had drawn Wall Street\u2019s eye with one of the most profitable AI portfolios of the past two years.<\/p>\n

The filing deadline passed on May 15th, yet no document appeared. Investors speculated<\/a> that the fund had requested confidential treatment from America\u2019s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), allowing it to hide positions for up to a year. More likely, the managers simply waited until the last day \u2014 standard practice for funds shadowed by thousands of traders.<\/p>\n

On May 18th the report did land \u2014 and revealed a radical shift: Aschenbrenner bulked up on AI infrastructure while opening a sweeping short against semiconductor firms.<\/p>\n

To see why the 24-year-old\u2019s portfolio commands such attention, rewind two years \u2014 to a firing, a manifesto and a bet on Bitcoin miners repurposing sites into data centres.<\/p>\n

Disclaimer<\/span><\/p>\n

ForkLog bears no responsibility for readers\u2019 investment decisions.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

A wunderkind from Berlin<\/h2>\n

Leopold Aschenbrenner was born in Germany to a family of doctors. He graduated from John F. Kennedy School in Berlin, enrolled at Columbia University and in 2021 became<\/a> valedictorian of his class.<\/p>\n

At 17 he received a grant from the economist Tyler Cowen via the Emergent Ventures programme. Cowen called<\/a> him \u201can economics wunderkind\u201d.<\/p>\n

In 2022 Aschenbrenner joined the FTX Future Fund, the charitable arm of Sam Bankman-Fried\u2019s crypto exchange. He witnessed the company\u2019s collapse<\/a> from the inside and left before its bankruptcy. Later he recalled<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe were a tiny team, and in a single day everything fell apart and became associated with a giant fraud. It was incredibly hard.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In 2023 Aschenbrenner joined OpenAI\u2019s Superalignment team \u2014 a unit led by Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike that worked on controlling a superintelligent AI. There he co-authored a research paper<\/a> Weak-to-Strong Generalization<\/span>.<\/p>\n

In parallel, Aschenbrenner wrote a memo to OpenAI\u2019s board warning about industrial-espionage risks from China and calling the firm\u2019s security \u201cegregiously inadequate\u201d. Earlier, the NYT reported<\/a> that in early 2023 a hacker broke into the startup\u2019s internal messaging systems and stole information about its AI-technology design.<\/p>\n

In spring 2024 Aschenbrenner was fired for leaking corporate data. He called the decision politically motivated and described the startup\u2019s security approach as \u201cnot robust enough to protect the theft of key secrets if foreign actors penetrated the company\u201d. A month later Sutskever and Leike left<\/a> OpenAI, after which the company disbanded Superalignment.<\/p>\n

In June 2024 Aschenbrenner published the essay<\/a> \u201cSituational Awareness\u201d, which caused a stir across the AI industry.<\/p>\n

Situational awareness in a hedge fund<\/h2>\n

The essay\u2019s central claim: artificial general intelligence (AGI) will arrive by 2027, the world is unprepared, and firms building the physical infrastructure for compute are the market\u2019s most undervalued assets.<\/p>\n

On Dwarkesh Patel\u2019s podcast<\/a> Aschenbrenner explained the investment logic through the scale of the necessary infrastructure. In 2022 the GPT-4 training cluster drew about 10 megawatts and cost roughly $500m. AI compute, he argued, scales by half an order of magnitude each year: by 2024 the largest cluster already demanded 100 megawatts and cost billions. He sketched the trajectory:<\/p>\n

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\u201cBy 2026 \u2014 a one-gigawatt cluster, the size of a large nuclear reactor. Tens of billions of dollars. By 2028 \u2014 10 gigawatts, more power than most states consume. By 2030 \u2014 a trillion-dollar cluster, 100 GW, more than 20% of all U.S. electricity generation. And that\u2019s just the training cluster.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That is only model training \u2014 inference<\/span> would require several times more capacity. Aschenbrenner likened<\/a> the advantage in the race for AGI to the coalition\u2019s technological lead in the First Gulf War:<\/p>\n

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\u201cWestern forces had a 100:1 casualty ratio. Better tank sensors, more accurate missiles, GPS, stealth. A 20\u201330 year lead \u2014 and they just crushed the opponent. A superintelligence applied across a broad range of R&D<\/span> could compress a century of technological progress into less than ten years.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In September 2024 Aschenbrenner founded the hedge fund Situational Awareness LP. Anchor investors included Stripe\u2019s co-founders, Patrick and John Collison, former GitHub boss Nat Friedman and Safe Superintelligence co-founder Daniel Gross. The minimum ticket is $25m<\/a>, with a two-year lock-up.<\/p>\n

According to The Wall Street Journal<\/a>, in the first half of 2025 the fund returned 47% after fees \u2014 versus roughly 6% for the S&P 500. The biggest contributions came from energy and data-centre bets.<\/p>\n

Fortune reported<\/a> that by early 2026 the fund\u2019s publicly disclosed exposure to U.S. assets had grown to about $5.5bn from roughly $225m at end-2024. To be clear: this refers not to verified net profit but to the size of positions disclosed in 13F filings \u2014 a measure that includes asset appreciation, new capital inflows and potential leverage.<\/p>\n

What the new 13F shows<\/h2>\n

Form 13F is a quarterly report that funds with over $100m in assets must file with the SEC. <\/p>\n

The previous Situational Awareness filing for Q4 2025 listed 29 positions worth $5.5bn with minimal options activity. The new report looks starkly different: 42 positions with disclosed exposure of $13.67bn \u2014 nearly tripled in a single quarter.<\/p>\n

Portfolio by instrument: 66% is in put options<\/span>, 10% in calls<\/span>, 24% in outright equities.<\/p>\n

The fund opened put positions on the biggest chipmakers \u2014 all new to the filing:<\/p>\n