At age 24, 20 billion US dollars, Jane Street rarely entered the market. He became the craziest fund manager in the AI industry
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Compiled and organized by: bitPushNews
Leopold Aschenbrenner (Leopold Aschenbrenner), Chief Investment Officer, Situational Awareness
Leopold Aschenbrenner (Leopold Aschenbrenner)'s predictions about the future of artificial intelligence have garnered him a wave of fanatical followers on the internet — his daily regulatory documents for investing in companies are all analyzed in detail by fans as if they were reading the scriptures.
The amazing parabolic performance of his hedge fund also enabled the 24-year-old to win his own fan base on Wall Street.
Less than two years ago, Ashenbrenner had no professional investment experience when he founded the AI-focused company “Situational Awareness” (Situational Awareness), and managed hundreds of millions of dollars in capital at the time.
According to people familiar with the matter, thanks to accurate stock selection and a continuous influx of capital flows, the scale of assets managed by the company has soared to more than 20 billion US dollars, approaching the size of Bill Ackman (Bill Ackman)'s Pershing Square (Pershing Square) and Dan Loeb (Dan Loeb)'s Third Point.
One of the people familiar with the matter said that after deducting fees, Situational Awareness has increased by about 270% as of May this year, and the return rate after deducting fees since inception is even greaterOver 1000%. According to the source, one of the fund's most successful bets is holdingAnthropicShares currently account for about one-fifth of their total assets. (Bitpush note: According to The Information and several industry insiders, Ashen Brenner's current fiancee is Avital Balwit, Anthropic's current Chief of Staff and core executive.)
According to somePeople familiar with the matter revealed that the fund's current investors include Jane Street (Jane Street), a savvy quantitative trading company that is one of the most profitable companies on Wall Street.
Jane Street Capital's investment in Situational Awareness is particularly notable because the company rarely allocates funds to external asset managers.
In every market frenzy, new star stock selectors are born, from Ryan Jacob (Ryan Jacob) and his Internet Fund (Internet Fund) during the Internet bubble period to Cathie Wood (Cathie Wood, “Sister Mu”) and its ARK Innovation ETF (ARK Innovation ETF) during the 2020 pandemic bull market.
However, among the investment managers who selected winners from the AI wave across the economy, no one attracted as much attention as Ashen Brenner — even though he himself deliberately avoided public appearances and rarely posted on X (originally Twitter).
> The tech industry talk show “TBPN” shared a meme about Ashen Brenner and borrowed images from the movie “The World of Chumen” in a recent episode.
Like other investors managing at least $100 million in assets, Situational Awareness is required to submit a quarterly lagging snapshot file disclosing their long positions in US stocks and options. Ashenbrenner's disclosure documents are viewed as a major event on social media, and fans will even count down to the next release of the documents. In March of this year, Autopilot, a trading app linked to the popular “Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker,” launched an option that allows users to copy transactions already disclosed by Ashenbrenner.
In May, there was news that Situational Awareness had taken a stake in solar manufacturer T1 Energy, which boosted the stock by 23% in one day and set the second-highest trading volume in the stock's history. On the May 18 program, the popular talk show “TBPN” in the tech industry, first spent about two minutes discussing the ruling on the Elon Musk (Elon Musk) and OpenAI lawsuit, then it took five times longer than that discussion to discuss the latest disclosure documents of Situational Awareness.
“It's been a long time since we've seen the market pay this much attention to a hedge fund's disclosure documents,” said John Coogan (John Coogan), co-host of “TBPN.”
The comments about Ashenbrenner sometimes sound even a little strange.
Podcast host Tim Ferriss called him “the Nostradamus (Great Prophet) of the AI world” and described him as “almost reaching the point of an unknown prophet” due to his extremely high hit rate in AI predictions. In May of this year, there was a brief panic in the market. At that time, many observers misread the options activity in the position file and came to the conclusion that Ashenbrenner had turned bearish on the market. In a podcast that has received over 100,000 views on YouTube, the title clearly reads: “The best AI investors have just shorted the entire market.”
A native German, Ashenbrunner graduated from Columbia University in 2021 as an Outstanding Graduate Representative (Class Valedictorian) and worked as a researcher at OpenAI for a short time.
The reason for his rise to fame stemmed from a paper entitled “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead” (“Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead”) published in 2024. This paper predicts the future development path of AI through “Computational OOMs” (that is, the level of computational power, algorithm efficiency, and model revisions that are expected to increase every year). Michael Dell (Michael Dell), Ivanka Trump (Ivanka Trump), and many others have shared this 165-page paper with their fans online.
Later that same year, Ashenbrenner founded his hedge fund company, which he described as “a think tank in the field of AI.” He also started a business with Carl Shulman (Carl Shulman), another AI expert who worked for Peter Thiel (Peter Thiel) Macro Hedge Fund. Early supporters include Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison (Patrick and John Collison), as well as Daniel Gross (Daniel Gross) and Nat Friedman (Nat Friedman), who are currently helping lead Meta Platforms' AI business.
> Jane Street Capital (Jane Street) is headquartered in New York. The quantitative trading company is one of Situational Awareness's investors.
At the beginning of 2025, Situational Awareness once experienced a loss due to the release of a low-cost AI model by the Chinese startup DeepSeek, which triggered a sell-off of Nvidia (Nvidia) and other AI-related stocks.
However, as demand for AI tools accelerated and triggered a sharp rise in chip makers, power equipment manufacturers, and other AI infrastructure vendors, the fund quickly recovered its losses.
According to people familiar with the matter, Situational Awareness achieved a profit of about 200% at the end of 2025.
Hedge funds' US regulatory disclosure documents omit foreign stocks and holdings in private companies, and these categories include some of Situational Awareness's most profitable positions, including Anthropic. The fund first invested in SK Hynix (SK Hynix) in November 2024, following the South Korean memory chip maker's sharp rise to the “trillion dollar club” over the past year. (The stock has taken back some of its gains in recent days.)
The company first invested in Anthropic in a funding round in February 2025, when Anthropic was valued at $61.5 billion. Today, Anthropic's valuation has reached $96.5 billion.
In addition to allocating funds to its hedge funds, Jane Street Capital also undertakes venture capital transactions alongside Situational Awareness. The two companies were leading investors in the funding round of matX (an emerging AI chip maker) in February of this year, and are currently participating in a new round of financing for Fluidstack (an AI cloud computing vendor).
As Ashenbrenner's company continues to expand, in addition to young AI researchers, many veteran Wall Street veterans have joined the team. Niki Webster (Niki Webster), who has worked in Goldman Sachs's commodity brokerage department for nearly ten years, is currently the company's director of investor relations. Sven Khatri, who has worked for both Citadel and Goldman Sachs, also recently joined the company as Director of Capital Strategy.
However, this was also the case with “Miss Mu Tou” back thenBon voyage... it's probably not too late to see what Ashenbrenner's long-term returns will be like in ten years.
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