Ken Griffin's Citadel has sold more than 80% of the positions it acquired from Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness, according to a report published by Economic Times Markets dated August 21, 2026 (22 Aug 2026, 12:41 AM IST).

The unwinding was carried out through nearly one hundred block trades valued at more than four billion dollars. The sales followed a steep loss in Situational Awareness's technology holdings. Since the more-than-80% portion already sold accounts for over four billion dollars of trading, the position Citadel originally absorbed was proportionally larger still. The episode also shows why block trades are used for stakes of this size: a single negotiated transaction lets a seller exit a concentrated position at an agreed price while transferring the shares, and the risk of reselling them, to the buyer. Breaking the subsequent resale into roughly one hundred separate trades is consistent with that distribution process, which spreads the selling across many smaller executions rather than a single market-moving order.

Situational Awareness is an AI-focused hedge fund founded by Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI researcher who is widely known for his June 2024 essay "Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead." In that essay, he argued that transformative AI could plausibly arrive within the decade and called for large-scale investment in compute and AI infrastructure alongside stronger national-security preparedness in the United States. The fund's technology holdings sit squarely in the sector at the center of that thesis. Citadel, founded by Ken Griffin in 1990, is one of the world's largest hedge fund firms, and taking on a multibillion-dollar block of this kind is the sort of commitment that generally requires the balance-sheet capacity of the largest multi-strategy players.

A block trade is a large, privately negotiated securities transaction executed at an agreed price between parties, typically handled outside public exchange order books. Such trades are often arranged through investment banks and are frequently priced at a discount to the prevailing market price, compensating the buyer for holding and reselling a large position.

The report does not address how the remaining, still-unsold portion of the positions will be handled.

Source: Economic Times Markets