The Securities and Exchange Commission has reportedly subpoenaed several major Wall Street lenders to glean more information about their role in the near-collapse of AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness.
Regulators are seeking insights into Situational Awareness’s trades, use of leverage and communications with the investment banks, which include Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup and Bank of America, according to Reuters, citing a source familiar with the matter.
Situational Awareness plunged from about $45 billion to around $10 billion in late July after it was hammered in last month’s tech sell-off.
The hedge fund, led by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, was forced to unwind much of its publicly listed portfolio of large, concentrated, levered positions — which included SK Hynix and CoreWeave — after losses sparked several margin calls among its prime brokers.
Aschenbrenner overleveraged the fund 4:1 and it had no diversity from AI stocks. The problem is their blocks of holdings were so large they could not sell them to meet the margin calls. You can’t just sell $16B in stock unless you dump it cheap.
Looks an awful lot like Citadel’s Ken Griffin set all this up to fail as he bought these stocks at a heavy discount.
Anyone stupid enough to invest in a non diversified hedge fund run by a 24 year old does not deserve to keep their money.