Situational Awareness, the hedge fund making headlines, explained | CNN Business

For years, Situational Awareness was closely tracked by Wall Street, members of the AI community and its founder’s fiercest followers. Outside those circles, however, the multibillion-dollar hedge fund remained largely unknown. But that was before it began unraveling this week. Situational Awareness was founded in 2024 by German-born Leopold Aschenbrenner when he was in his early 20s. Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI employee, founded the hedge fund on the premise that “AI will be the dominant driver of global market returns over the next decade,” according to the firm’s site. In June 2024, he laid out his rationale in a 165-page essay, which argued that governments, businesses and investors underestimated how quickly AI would transform the economy. He started Situational Awareness with early backing from prominent Silicon Valley investors, including the founders of payment processor Stripe. Aschenbrenner managed to turn hundreds of millions of dollars into tens of billions of dollars over the course of roughly two years. During those two years, AI-related stocks saw plenty of swings, including when Chinese AI company DeepSeek caused investors to question whether American com