Leopold Aschenbrenner
Former OpenAI safety researcher whose 2024 essay on fast AI scaling became the basis for his own hedge fund.
Aschenbrenner worked at the FTX Future Fund from early 2022, left before that collapse, and joined OpenAI’s Superalignment team in 2023. He was dismissed in April 2024 over an alleged information leak, which he disputed. Later that year his long essay “Situational Awareness” argued that AI capability would improve far faster than most people expected, and it circulated widely.
He turned the thesis into a hedge fund of the same name, betting on the chips, memory, data centres and power the buildout would require. The fund reached 45 billion dollars in assets with eight employees, then had to sell nearly its whole listed portfolio to Citadel in July 2026 after leveraged positions triggered margin calls.