Leopold Aschenbrenner, the ‘Nostradamus of AI’, set to marry Anthropic CEO’s chief of staff
Former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner is celebrating his wedding to Avital Balwit, chief of staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, in Carmel, California, over the weekend. The celebrations come as his AI-focused hedge fund grapples with steep losses and the sale of most of its publicly traded holdings.Leopold Aschenbrenner is celebrating his wedding weekend with Anthropic executive Avital Balwit. (Leopold Aschenbrenner | X)(Also read: Who is Leopold Aschenbrenner? Net worth, family in focus as AI hedge fund, Situational Awareness, faces setback)Lavish wedding planned in CaliforniaFortune, which first reported the couple’s engagement in October 2025, described them as an AI power couple. Citing The Wall Street Journal, the publication reported that the multi-day festivities would begin with a colloquium featuring panel discussions and breakout sessions.The ceremony is reportedly being held at a Tuscan-style villa, followed a send-off to a forest spa retreat for the couple’s honeymoon. Guests were also reportedly requested not to bring wedding gifts.Aschenbrenner met Balwit while they were both working at the FTX Future Fund, the philanthropic arm linked to Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency empire. They left the organisation with other employees as FTX collapsed.Why was he called the ‘Nostradamus of AI’?Fortune reported that the 24-year-old investor became known as the “Nostradamus of AI” after his predictions about artificial intelligence helped him build a rapidly expanding investment operation.His hedge fund, Situational Awareness, placed concentrated and heavily leveraged bets on companies linked to memory chips, data centres and other parts of the AI infrastructure industry. The fund reported a return of 439 per cent the end of June 2026, according to an investor letter cited the Financial Times.The Wall Street Journal described Situational Awareness as a $45 billion investing operation at its peak. (Also read: Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness unwinds hedge fund with up to $24B after leveraged AI bets fail)However, its fortunes reversed sharply during a sell-off in AI-related stocks. According to Reuters, the fund fell 67 per cent in July but remained about 80 per cent higher for the year. It later sold the bulk of its public-equity portfolio to Ken Griffin’s Citadel.From OpenAI researcher to hedge fund founderAschenbrenner joined OpenAI in 2023 and was fired in 2024. He subsequently published a 165-page essay series titled “Situational Awareness”, in which he predicted rapid advances in artificial intelligence and examined their potential economic and national-security consequences.He later turned the ideas outlined in the essay into the investment thesis behind his hedge fund, Situational Awareness, which rapidly attracted attention from Silicon Valley investors.
