Investing.com -- Leopold Aschenbrenner's hedge fund Situational Awareness has grown to more than $20 billion in assets under management, approaching the size of Bill Ackman's Pershing Square and Dan Loeb's Third Point, according to a Wall Street Journal report Monday.

The AI-focused firm has gained about 270% after fees this year through May and is up more than 1,000% after fees since its launch less than two years ago with a few hundred million dollars, the report said.

One of the fund's most successful positions is a stake in Anthropic that reportedly now represents about one-fifth of its assets. Aschenbrenner's firm first invested in Anthropic in February of 2025 at a valuation of just above $60 billion. The AI giant was valued at $965 billion in its most recent share sale.

Situational Awareness now counts Jane Street among its investors, the report said. The quant-trading firm's investment is notable because Jane Street rarely allocates capital to outside money managers.

In May, news that Situational Awareness took a stake in T1 Energy sent shares in the solar manufacturer up 23% in a single day, recording its second-highest trading volume ever.

Aschenbrenner, 24, is a native of Germany who graduated from Columbia University as the 2021 class valedictorian. He briefly worked as a researcher at OpenAI before starting his fund. Aschenbrenner had no professional investing experience when he started the fund.

He gained prominence with a 2024 essay titled "Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead," which predicted AI's development path by counting the orders of magnitude by which computing power, algorithmic efficiencies and model improvements are expected to advance each year. The 165-page paper was shared by Michael Dell, Ivanka Trump and others with their online followers.