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Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness Back in Options Market, CNBC Reports

CNBC reports that Leopold Aschenbrenner's hedge fund, Situational Awareness, has resumed trading in public markets by buying options on AI-related stocks, months after a leveraged selloff pushed its assets down from above $45 billion to about $10 billion.

AI News Feed · 2026-09-11 23:55

The firm purchased options in Advanced Micro Devices, Bloom Energy and CoreWeave, sources told CNBC's David Faber. The trades were made late last week and early this week, the sources said.

Other names where the fund was active include SK Hynix and SanDisk. Situational Awareness also bought options in the Roundhill Memory ETF, which trades under the ticker DRAM, according to the same sources.

The activity follows a sharp reversal for the fund. Its assets fell to about $10 billion after peaking above $45 billion at the start of July, CNBC reported. A rapid decline that month in AI-related stocks that Aschenbrenner had bought using leverage left him little room, and he sold his public equity positions to Ken Griffin's Citadel in a fire sale to stave off a collapse.

Situational Awareness kept its stakes in private companies, including Anthropic, after the July sale to Citadel.

It was not clear whether Aschenbrenner was raising new money to fund the options purchases, or drawing on assets left in the fund after the July decline and the sale to Citadel, CNBC reported.

The disclosures, based on accounts from people familiar with the trades, describe the fund's first known public-market positions since it stepped back from equity holdings over the summer. Aschenbrenner is an AI researcher who ran the hedge fund through a period of rapid growth before the summer contraction.

According to CNBC, the options positions span chipmakers, an energy company tied to data-center power demand, and memory-related instruments, a group that broadly tracks the AI infrastructure trade that drove the fund's earlier gains. The report did not specify the size, direction or expiration of any of the option contracts.

The sources did not say whether the trades were newly opened positions or part of a broader strategy. CNBC reported that the timing of the purchases fell in the final days of last week and the opening days of this week.

Neither Aschenbrenner nor representatives for Situational Awareness were cited in the report as commenting on the trades. Details such as the fund's current total assets, its cash position and any outstanding financing arrangements were not disclosed in the CNBC account.