David Mann was in a taxi heading to LaGuardia Airport when he heard the news: Wall Street’s AI wunderkind was in trouble. It was the afternoon of Wednesday, July 29, and Mann got a call from someone working on behalf of Leopold Aschenbrenner’s hedge fund, Situational Awareness, asking if he wanted to buy a piece of the fund’s stake in Anthropic, the AI powerhouse. A deal needed to be done overnight, Mann was told. Mann realized what was happening—nobody sells pre-IPO shares in a company valued at nearly $1 trillion unless they are on the ropes.  “Aschenbrenner was being forced…

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