# Leopold Aschenbrenner **Leopold Aschenbrenner** is the former OpenAI researcher whose 2024 essay series **[[Situational Awareness]]** turned "AGI by 2027" into a national-security doctrine. He then built one of the fastest-growing hedge funds on Wall Street on the same thesis, and in **July 2026** watched it lose two-thirds of its value in a month. He links three worlds the vault tracks: [[Effective Altruism]] and [[Longtermism]], the China-hawk "AGI Manhattan Project" wing of the tech right, and the AI capital boom. ## Path - **Columbia, 2021.** Valedictorian at 19. He co-founded the campus effective-altruism group and did research linked to Oxford's Future of Humanity and Global Priorities institutes. - **FTX Future Fund, 2022.** He joined [[Sam Bankman-Fried]]'s philanthropic arm in February 2022 and resigned on Nov. 11, 2022, the day [[FTX]] filed for bankruptcy. - **OpenAI, 2023–24.** He worked on the superalignment team under [[Jan Leike]] and [[Ilya Sutskever]]. He was fired in April 2024. OpenAI said it was over a leak of a brainstorming document. He says it was retaliation for a memo to the board warning that the lab's security was inadequate against Chinese espionage. ## The essay *Situational Awareness* (June 2024, about 165 pages) extrapolated scaling trends to argue for AGI around 2027 and superintelligence soon after. Its conclusion was that the U.S. government must treat frontier AI like the bomb: lock down the labs, build the power and chips, and win the race against China. [[Ivanka Trump]] praised it publicly. Its race-with-China framing became common in Washington's AI policy debate (compare the [[AI Action Plan]]). Critics in the [[TESCREAL]] literature read it as the whole pipeline in one document: existential-risk framing becomes strategic urgency, which becomes capital. ## The fund He launched **Situational Awareness LP** with backing from [[Patrick Collison]] and John Collison, [[Nat Friedman]] and [[Daniel Gross]]. He ran it as a concentrated bet on the physical layer of AI: memory chips, power and data-center suppliers. - **The rise.** Its disclosed long positions reached **$20.2 billion** at June 30, 2026, led by SanDisk (28%), [[Micron]] (27.5%) and [[Bloom Energy]], per 13F data. The fund was reportedly up more than 400% in the first half of 2026, and some reports put its peak including leverage at about $45 billion. - **The fall.** In late July the AI-infrastructure trade reversed, and his leveraged longs and short positions both went against him. Prime brokers made margin calls, and the fund **lost about 67% in July**. It was forced to unwind its public stock book, about $16 billion, and [[Citadel]] bought most of it. About a week earlier, Aschenbrenner had invited investors to add money at "attractive entry points." His letter afterward told them "We let you down this month." The fund kept about $10 billion and said it would stop using leverage. It was still reported as up for the year. ## Why he matters Aschenbrenner is the tech right's doomsday-to-dollars conversion in its purest form. He argued that AGI is a national emergency and then made the most leveraged possible bet on that emergency's supply chain. The July 2026 blowup, like the FTX collapse he walked out of, is a reminder that the movement's most confident forecasts have been tested by markets and failed. ## See also - [[Situational Awareness]] · [[OpenAI]] · [[Safe Superintelligence]] · [[Ilya Sutskever]] - [[Effective Altruism]] · [[Longtermism]] · [[Effective Accelerationism]] · [[TESCREAL]] · [[Russian Cosmism]] · [[Transhumanist Defense]] - [[Superintelligence (Book)]] · [[AI Action Plan]] · [[Citadel]] · [[FTX]]