Leopold Aschenbrenner’s pitch for why he — a college-aged German with no prior finance experience — was the best choice for an investor hoping to nail the artificial intelligence wave revolved around his network.

“Right now, there are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness,” the former OpenAI employee wrote in his 2024 viral essay “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead.”

“Through whatever peculiar forces of fate, I have found myself amongst them.”

Now those same connections — chief among them, his wife, Avital Balwit, the chief of staff to Anthropic founder Dario Amodei — are set to add an additional layer of complexity…