Kalshi’s John Wang Disputes Narrative That Sam Bankman-Fried Drove Key AI Venture Bets

Kalshi’s head of crypto, John Wang, said in a post on X that the widely held view of Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) as a top venture investor behind bets on projects such as Anthropic and Cursor is inaccurate. According to Odaily, Wang said the key figure behind the investment positioning and early resource allocation was Leopold Aschenbrenner, not SBF. The report said the remarks sparked discussion in crypto and venture capital circles about who should be credited for SBF’s early investment influence in Silicon Valley and the crypto industry. Odaily reported that Situational Awareness, an AI fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, has a scale of more than $20 billion, and quantitative trading firm Jane Street has invested in it. The fund’s return this year was reported at 270%, with cumulative returns since inception exceeding 1,000%. The report said an equity bet on Anthropic contributed the fund’s most successful returns and accounted for one-fifth of its assets. It also said Situational Awareness and Jane Street co-led an investment in AI chipmaker MatX and participated in a new financing round for AI cloud computing company Fluidstack.