Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness forced to sell its public book. Citadel took it.
The highest-profile AI thesis fund just had its entire public equity book liquidated under margin pressure. The buyer, according to the Wall Street Journal, was Citadel.
Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness LP, the AI-focused hedge fund that grew from roughly $225 million at launch into the tens of billions, was forced to unwind its entire public equity book after steep losses on AI infrastructure names and adverse moves on its short positions.
According to people familiar with the matter cited by CNBC and the Wall Street Journal, the fund’s prime brokers (including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan) were involved as margin requirements forced an orderly reduction of both long and short public positions. The bulk of that public portfolio was acquired by Citadel.
The losses came from the same AI infrastructure complex that has been under pressure for weeks: memory, power, neocloud, and related names that had been core to the fund’s thesis. Software shorts that moved against the book compounded the damage. High leverage turned a sharp drawdown into a forced sale.
The fund is not shutting down. It continues with its private holdings, including a significant stake in Anthropic. The public book, however, is gone, transferred in what multiple reports describe as a single large transaction under pressure.
For the broader tape this is the cleanest illustration yet of how concentrated, leveraged AI-thesis capital can be forced out when the infrastructure layer sells off hard. The names that were in that book will now sit on a different balance sheet.