Industry AI Minute Newsroom 2026-08-26

A 24-year-old's AI fund fell from $45 billion to $10 billion in days. Now the SEC is subpoenaing his banks.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has sent subpoenas to Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase — the banks that lent to Situational Awareness and cleared its trades — and told them to preserve everything related to the fund. Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI researcher, started it in July 2024 at the age of 22 and had never run money before. The book was concentrated in the suppliers of the AI build-out — Nebius, SanDisk, Micron, CoreWeave — with reported leverage as high as 400 percent; when those names fell more than 35 percent in a month, margin calls forced him to sell the public portfolio to Citadel at a discount, and roughly $45 billion in positions became about $10 billion. Regulators want the timing of the trades, the leverage, and the conversations with lenders. No one has been accused of wrongdoing, and the fund says it will cooperate fully.

Why it mattersEvery AI enquiry so far has been about the technology — what a model said, what it was trained on, what it did. This one is about the money behind it. The subpoenas do not go to the fund first; they go to the four banks that financed it, which is how a regulator asks whether one concentrated bet on AI infrastructure could have reached the lenders. Whatever the answer, it is the first public accounting of how much borrowed money is standing behind the AI trade.

✓ Verified · 4 sources

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A 24-year-old's AI fund fell from $45 billion to $10 billion in days. Now the SEC is subpoenaing his banks.

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