While the young AI-investor Leopold Aschenbrenner may be regrouping after his hedge fund nearly imploded, there are 5,000 investors still holding onto a portfolio that mimics his public stock holdings.
Investors on Autopilot, a platform that offers portfolios based on the disclosed holdings of prominent investors, politicians, or other themes. About $32 million piled into the Aschenbrenner strategy between the fund’s March launch to early last week, Brian Schardt, Autopilot’s CEO, told Business Insider.
As Aschenbrenner’s struggles became public last week, Autopilot sent investors a memo, Schardt said, explaining that they could choose to stay invested or pull their money. Between $3 million and $5 million in capital was withdrawn, he said, but $28 million, held by over 5,000 investors, remains in the strategy.
They’re up 35% from the portfolio’s lowest point last Wednesday, but the Autopilot portfolio was down more than 30% in July.
Investors on Autopilot have a few important distinctions from high-flying hedge funds: they don’t use leverage, take short positions, or trade complex derivatives. They simply mirror an investor’s disclosed stock holdings and estimate the equivalent stock exposure from call options, updating the portfolio only when new information is available. That means they avoided the leverage that ultimately sank Situational Awareness.
Situational Awareness lost 67% over July, but is up 80% on the year.
“Ours is not leveraged, which means we don’t take the same risk that he took, which is better,” said Schardt.
The lack of leverage means the portfolio is down less than Situational Awareness on the downside, but also up less at its highs. It’s up 53.4% from its March 5 launch.
What Autopilot investors are holding
Autopilot’s Aschenbrenner portfolio holds 14 stocks, with 30% of it in neocloud Nebius, and another 12% in both Coreweave and Bloom Energy. Much of the rest is concentrated in similar AI-infrastructure plays.
These stocks had a volatile July, getting hit by jitters in Asian markets. Even big hyperscalers saw their stock prices fall over investor concerns about splashy AI spending. After weeks of steep losses and margin calls from bank partners, Aschenbrenner was forced to sell the bulk of his publicly traded stock holdings at a 10% discount to Ken Griffin’s Citadel. After news broke that Citadel had bought the portfolio, the same stocks that sank Situational Awareness rallied, benefiting those who held on to them.
Since the Autopilot mainly follows moves in 13Fs — quarterly disclosures of many US stock holdings released 45 days after the end of a quarter — those following Situational Awareness’s portfolio stayed put. His prior filings have been highly watched in the financial world, and his next release, which will come by August 14, is sure to attract widespread attention.
Autopilot plans to continue to copy the funds portfolio as long as it’s trading, said Schardt. And if Anthropic goes public later this year, one of its most significant investments will be available to the public markets, and therefore, to Autopilot.
As to what they would do if he were to shut down his fund entirely, Autopilot treats such instances on a case-by-case basis, said Schardt. For example, the company plans to convert the assets in its Representative Nancy Pelosi stock trade tracker, the company’s largest fund with $535 million AUM, into a general politician trade tracker once she retires early next year (and her trading activities are no longer public).
