---
description: Aschenbrenner wrote the analysis openly, attracted elite LPs who could independently verify the thesis, then deployed capital along the attractor path he identified — the purest case study of transparent insight creating investable credibility
type: analysis
domain: livingip
created: 2026-03-05
confidence: proven
source: "Fortune Oct 2025, SEC 13F filings, Litquidity, Daniel Scrivner Q4 2025 analysis"
---

# Situational Awareness LP converted a 165-page thesis into a 5.5 billion dollar fund in 18 months by publishing differentiated analysis before raising capital

Leopold Aschenbrenner worked on OpenAI's Superalignment team, saw capability trajectories firsthand, got fired for raising security concerns, then published everything he knew in a 165-page essay ("Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead," June 2024). Three months later he launched a hedge fund named after the essay.

The sequence: insider knowledge formation → narrative crystallization (the essay) → credibility capital (viral reception, Ivanka Trump endorsement, national security circles) → capital formation ($225M seed from Collison brothers, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross) → non-obvious positioning (infrastructure bottlenecks downstream of chips).

Growth trajectory: $225M (Q4 2024) → $1.5B (mid-2025) → $5.52B in US equity positions (Q4 2025). Returns: 47% after fees in H1 2025 vs 6% S&P 500.

The fund inverts the standard hedge fund model. Traditional funds guard their thesis as proprietary edge. Aschenbrenner published his thesis for free, in full, before raising a dollar. The publication became the pitch deck — "I'm so confident in this analysis that I don't need to hide it." The LPs (Collisons, Friedman, Gross) are not passive capital; they are domain experts who can independently evaluate the thesis. This is skin-in-the-game at every layer.

This maps directly to the [[teleological investing answers three questions in sequence -- where must the industry go and where in the stack will value concentrate and who will control that position]] framework. Aschenbrenner answered all three: (1) AI infrastructure buildout is near-inevitable, (2) value concentrates at the power/compute hosting layer (not chips, not models), (3) the winners are whoever controls power purchase agreements and physical data center capacity. His Q4 2025 pivot — exiting Nvidia and Broadcom, going all-in on Bloom Energy, CoreWeave, and Bitcoin miners pivoting to AI hosting — shows real-time refinement of which bottleneck position captures value.

Since [[giving away the intelligence layer to capture value on capital flow is the business model because domain expertise is the distribution mechanism not the revenue source]], Aschenbrenner's approach validates the model at human scale. He gave away the intelligence (the essay) and captured value on capital flow (the fund). This is exactly the pipeline Living Capital agents are designed to execute.

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Relevant Notes:
- [[teleological investing answers three questions in sequence -- where must the industry go and where in the stack will value concentrate and who will control that position]] — the framework this case study validates
- [[giving away the intelligence layer to capture value on capital flow is the business model because domain expertise is the distribution mechanism not the revenue source]] — Aschenbrenner did this as a human; Living Capital agents do it systematically
- [[value in industry transitions accrues to bottleneck positions in the emerging architecture not to pioneers or to the largest incumbents]] — the fund's pivot from chips to power demonstrates this in real-time
- [[teleological investing is structurally contrarian because most market participants are local optimizers whose short time horizons systematically undervalue long-horizon convergence plays]] — the fund's positions (long Intel, short Nvidia) are structurally contrarian
- [[industry transitions produce speculative overshoot because correct identification of the attractor state attracts capital faster than the knowledge embodiment lag can absorb it]] — the $225M to $5.5B growth in one year may be this exact pattern

Topics:
- [[teleological-economics overview]]
