Situational Awareness Returned 439% in Six Months. Citadel Just Bought Its Book at the Bottom.
The mechanics that killed a $45 billion AI fund were filed publicly in May. The two spreads that did it, and the free screens that showed both in real time.
Situational Awareness returned 439% in the first half of 2026 and still sold its public book at the bottom, in a week priced for a rate hike that never came. The decision block, the numbers, and what would kill the view:
On Wednesday, July 29, the Federal Open Market Committee voted 9-3 to hold the federal funds rate at 3.50-3.75%. Before Thursday’s open, Situational Awareness LP, the AI-concentrated hedge fund run by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, sold its public equities book in a single block, longs and shorts together, to Ken Griffin’s Citadel. How much of it went is itself disputed: the whole book, per SpotGamma’s account of CNBC’s reporting and The Next Web’s of the FT’s; the majority of it, per TechCrunch. On Thursday, the names in that book ripped: SanDisk rose 23.9%, Micron 17.0%, Bloom Energy 26.4%, with the Nasdaq 100 up 3.1%.
The consensus reading of this episode is already settled: a brilliant, over-levered kid met a margin call, and leverage kills. That reading is true and worthless. Every professional already knows leverage kills. What the consensus misses is what the public record shows on two specific points. The fund’s hedges were structurally incapable of protecting it, and the numbers proving that sat in its own filings since May. And the panic that filled its final week was measurably part hedging flow rather than forecast, a distinction visible in real time on two free screens. Neither required inside information. That is the part worth a professional’s time.
