Situational Awareness sold its Anthropic stake at a 20% discount

This article was published on August 18, 2026 The $30bn loss has been public for three weeks. The Wall Street Journal has now reconstructed the six days behind it, including a 20% discount, a twelve-hour deadline, and a second negotiation the first set of buyers knew nothing about. Situational Awareness lost roughly $30bn in July. The desk reported that three weeks ago. What happened inside those six days has not. Gregory Zuckerman, Juliet Chung and Peter Rudegeair have reconstructed it for the Wall Street Journal, and the sequence is stranger than the number. David Mann runs the Mannsion Group, a family office holding stakes in Anthropic and other private companies. On the afternoon of Wednesday 29 July he was in a taxi to LaGuardia when someone acting for Leopold Aschenbrenner’s fund rang. Did he want to buy a piece of its Anthropic stake? The deal had to be done overnight. Mann drew the obvious inference. Nobody offloads pre-IPO shares in a company valued near $1tn unless something has gone wrong. “Aschenbrenner was being forced to sell,” Mann told the paper. “He needed the money and was sounding people out.” John Pfeffer of Pfeffer Capital, an investor in the fund since it star