Hedge fund Situational Awareness unwound its entire public stock book, with Citadel the buyer

CNBC reported on Thursday, 30 July 2026, citing people familiar with the matter, that hedge fund Situational Awareness, run by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, has been forced to sell all of its publicly traded stock holdings. According to the report, Ken Griffin's Citadel hedge fund reached a deal to buy those assets.

CNBC's sources said the fund had grown to as much as 45 billion dollars at the start of July before sustaining significant losses in recent weeks: its portfolio of AI infrastructure investments including SK Hynix declined, while short positions in software companies such as Adobe moved sharply against it. The fund's prime brokers, including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, have been working with it to meet margin requirements or reduce positions in an orderly fashion, an indication that the fund had used leverage.

Regulatory filings showed the fund's largest holdings at the end of the first quarter included Nebius Group, Sandisk, Micron and CoreWeave, all four of which are down more than 35% this month. A spokesman for the firm said reports that it was marketing a stake it owns in Anthropic are not accurate. CNBC added that the size of the fund's losses and the amount it was seeking to raise could not be determined. The episode coincides with sharp swings in chip and memory stocks in Asian and US markets this week.