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Trades put on by a former AI researcher turned hedge funder indicate bearish views on where the stock market’s favorite trade could be headed. <\/p>\n
Leopold Aschenbrenner, the former researcher on OpenAI’s alignment team went viral in 2024 for his paper, “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead,” which highlighted key concerns<\/a> about the progress of AI. Three months later, he launched his hedge fund<\/a>, Situational Awareness, which is now betting against some of the hottest chip plays while turning bullish on other areas of the AI infrastructure trade.<\/p>\n According to the firm’s latest 13F filing on May 18, it bought more than $1.5 billion worth of put options on Nvidia<\/a> and over $2 billion of puts on the VanEck Semiconductor ETF<\/a> in the first quarter of the year. Puts allow an investor to bet on the price of a stock or ETF will fall, while call options are bets a stock could rise.<\/p>\n Aschenbrenner’s fund also has over $1 billion of puts on Broadcom and over $1 billion of puts on software giant Oracle.<\/p>\n Here’s a list of some of the firm’s bearish put option bets:<\/p>\n Disclosure of the puts on some major names in the AI trade comes as other big investors have voiced their doubts recently. “The Big Short” investor Michael Burry revealed a short position<\/a> against Nvidia in late in 2025, and has been broadly bearish on the tech-fueled rally that’s boosted the stock market to records.<\/p>\n Last week, meawhile, short seller Culper Research published a short report<\/a> on Nvidia, flagging it’s potential to see shares drop amid problems in China.<\/p>\n Among the stocks it has long positions on or holds bullish call options for, Situational Awareness leaned toward a few other chip makers, but also infrastructure plays like CoreWeave. <\/p>\n Here are some of its call options positions:<\/p>\n Situational Awareness did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n