SBF's underling turned 225 million into 5.5 billion in just one year.

Author: Azuma , Odaily Planet Daily

Have you heard of Leopold Aschenbrenner?

This is one of the hottest names in the AI ​​investment circle right now— the 24-year-old's Situational Awareness LP fund had a publicly disclosed holding of "only" $225 million in Q4 2024, but in the holdings disclosure released last month for Q4 2025, this figure has grown rapidly to $5.5 billion.

What few people know is that Leopold Aschenbrenner was once a member of the crypto world—he worked for the FTX Future Fund team under FTX until FTX went bankrupt and collapsed.

AI genius from a family of doctors

Leopold Aschenbrenner was born in Germany to both of his parents, who were doctors.

In 2021, 19-year-old Leopold Aschenbrenner graduated first in his class from Columbia University with a double degree in economics and mathematical statistics. While at Columbia, Leopold Aschenbrenner co-founded the university’s chapter on Effective Altruism (EA).

"Effective altruism" was a motto that FTX founder SBF often repeated. Perhaps sharing the same philosophy, Leopold Aschenbrenner joined the FTX Future Fund team in February 2022. This was a philanthropic initiative created by the FTX Foundation to promote effective altruism, and Leopold Aschenbrenner worked on the team until November 2022, just before FTX collapsed.

In 2023, Leopold Aschenbrenner left FTX and joined OpenAI, now a leading AI company, to work on the Superalignment team, led by Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike. The team is dedicated to technological breakthroughs to guide and control artificial intelligence systems that are more intelligent than humans.

In April 2023, OpenAI's internal communication system was hacked, but the company did not disclose the incident. Leopold Aschenbrenner subsequently submitted a memo to the OpenAI board of directors, arguing that OpenAI's security measures were inadequate. Aschenbrenner later stated that this memo caused a disagreement between the board and management regarding security issues, and he himself received a warning from the human resources department.

In April 2024, OpenAI fired Leopold Aschenbrenner for alleged information leakage. Aschenbrenner countered that the alleged "leak" referred to a brainstorming session he shared with three external researchers, solely for feedback. OpenAI claimed the dismissal was unrelated to a security memo Aschenbrenner had previously submitted, while Aschenbrenner stated that someone explicitly told him this memo was the primary reason for his dismissal. Just one month later, the Superalignment team disbanded, and other prominent AI researchers, including Ilya Sutskever, left OpenAI.

Interestingly, Leopold Aschenbrenner's conflict with OpenAI is not limited to this one incident. His fiancée, Avital Balwit, is now the chief of staff of Anthropic, OpenAI's biggest competitor... and FTX was one of Anthropic's major early investors.

Leaving the front lines of technology and entering the investment world

In June 2024, just two months after leaving OpenAI, Leopold Aschenbrenner wrote a 165-page mega-paper titled "Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead." This paper, comprising multiple chapters, predicted the emergence of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), envisioned the path from AGI to superintelligence, described four major risks facing humanity, outlined methods for humanity to cope with superintelligence, and articulated the principles of "AGI Realism."

The paper "Context Awareness: The Next Decade" sparked a huge discussion in Silicon Valley, making Leopold Aschenbrenner a household name. Subsequently, in September 2024, Leopold Aschenbrenner founded the fund of the same name, Situational Awareness LP, and served as its chief investment officer, focusing on investment opportunities in the AI ​​industry chain.

There is no publicly available information on the initial fund size of Situational Awareness LP, but according to reports from mainstream media such as the WSJ and Fortune in mid-2025, the fund's total assets under management at that time were approximately $1.5 billion, and the LPs included Stripe's two co-founders, Patrick Collison and John Collison, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and well-known investor Daniel Gross.

According to the 13F filing disclosed by Situational Awareness LP (a quarterly disclosure required by the SEC for funds with assets under management exceeding $100 million), in Q4 2024, the total value of Situational Awareness LP's publicly disclosed holdings was "only" $255 million. However, in the holdings disclosure for Q4 2025 released on February 16 this year, that figure had grown to an astonishing $5.5 billion.

Considering that Situational Awareness LP was not established for very long in Q4 2024, the fund likely had some reserves in addition to its $255 million open position. However, even if we take the total assets under management of around $1.5 billion by mid-2025 as the starting point, the open position would have increased to $5.5 billion by Q4 of the same year, which is already quite remarkable.

Portfolio Analysis: Cryptocurrency Remains a Concern

Situational Awareness LP disclosed the fund’s 29 major holdings in its 13F filing, details of which can be seen in the image below.

As shown in the figure, Situational Awareness LP's bet on AI is not concentrated on the application side, which is more popular in the media, but rather on the upstream infrastructure industry chain.

• Situational Awareness LP's top ten holdings account for as much as 86% of its portfolio, indicating a highly concentrated strategy, primarily focusing on sectors such as energy, computing power, optical communication, and storage.
• The largest holding, Bloom Energy, focuses on the research and development of solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC) and electrolyzers (SOEC). Driven by the growth in demand from AI data centers, the company's performance has continued to exceed expectations, and its stock price has increased more than 10 times since the end of 2024.
• Popular stocks such as Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are not in the portfolio, suggesting that Situational Awareness LP prefers relatively "unpopular" stocks.
• Situational Awareness LP's only disclosed short position is a short position in the form of options against Indian software services exporter Infosys, which appears to be a bet that the growth of Claude Code and Codex will replace traditional IT outsourcing jobs.

Another clue somewhat related to the crypto world is that Situational Awareness LP's holdings include several Bitcoin mining companies, such as Core Scientific, Cipher Mining, Iren (formerly Iris Energy), and Bitdeer, owned by Jihan Wu.

Unfortunately, Situational Awareness LP is clearly not interested in these companies' direct cryptocurrency business, but rather in betting on the transformation of mining companies into AI computing power centers. In the context of the rising AI trend and the sluggish crypto market, more and more mining companies are proactively seeking change by leveraging their existing resource advantages such as land, computing power, and electricity. As a preview, we will be publishing another article about this trend soon.

A crossroads in fate, a reconstruction of beliefs

Looking back at Leopold Aschenbrenner's career, it's hard not to think of another once-promising young talent, SBF—both worked at FTX, both believed in effective altruism, and both achieved remarkable success in investing. But after one wrong step, SBF is now a prisoner, facing decades of imprisonment; while Leopold Aschenbrenner's life took a different turn after FTX's sudden collapse, but fortunately, it seems to be a path more suitable for him.

Time doesn't turn back, and fate never gives people a second chance. Some are left forever in the ruins of the old era, while others are forced off their original paths, but in doing so, they unveil entirely new stories.

As someone involved in the crypto industry, what comes to mind right now is this: the industry is at its most precarious moment of upheaval and transformation since its inception. Some are leaving in disappointment, some are hesitant and observing, but others are actively embracing new technological waves and narrative shifts. History often unfolds in this way: the collapse of old stories often coincides with the birth of new ones. The reconstruction of beliefs is, in itself, another form of opportunity.