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The spectacular saga around Situational Awareness isn’t over yet.
The once mega-hyped AI hedge fund, founded by 24-year-old Leopold Ashenbrenner, nearly imploded last month after it lost over two-thirds of its value during a mass tech sell-off, wiping out billions of dollars of investor money.
Now, the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating its catastrophic reversal of fortunes, sending subpoenas to the banks that handled and fronted the money for its disastrous bets, the New York Times reports, citing anonymous sources.
The subpoenas demanded details on the timing of the fund’s trades and for its communications with the bank about the money it was borrowing. Situational Awareness used the borrowed money, called leverage, to buy shares in the AI stocks it was investing in, which boosted its returns but exposed it to even greater losses when those assets hit a downturn.
As it stands, Situational Awareness hasn’t been accused of any wrongdoing, and it’s possible that the investigation won’t lead to any action or punishments such as fines being taken against it.
In a statement, the fund framed the SEC’s subpoenas as a matter of course.
“It is to be expected that regulators would closely examine any funds that are high profile, produce significant returns or have particularly dramatic drawdowns,” a spokesperson told the NYT. “We are a highly regulated business and will cooperate to the fullest extent with any regulatory request.”
Situational Awareness’s near implosion became a symbol of heedless AI optimism — and a warning sign of the industry’s precarious foundations. Its founder Aschenbrenner was a former OpenAI researcher who had no investment experience before launching the fund, but generated cultish hype by essentially telling AI investors what they wanted to hear: that the tech would bring endless gains. At its peak, it managed assets worth $45 billion in total.
But its all-in bets on exclusively AI stocks — and hedges against industries that some thought would be outmoded by AI such as software — caused it to tank when the market hit a downturn. The Financial Times found that the fund operated with a skeleton staff of only four investment professionals and eight employees overall.
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