Aschenbrenner's Receipts

× In June 2024, Leopold Aschenbrenner published a 165-page essay called Situational Awareness and committed himself to a chain of dated forecasts. Test-time compute would be the next paradigm. Power, not chips, would be the binding constraint on the US AI buildout. The Marcellus shale would end up powering data centres, not the hyperscalers’ climate pledges. By May 2026 those calls have landed. Eight of his concrete technology and infrastructure predictions have confirmed cleanly. Eight others have falsified: voluntary lab merger, Congressional trillions, a coalition of democracies, tightening export controls. This split tells us something about the worldview holding both halves up. Read Situational Awareness and the four-and-a-half-hour Dwarkesh Patel interview side by side and you find something stranger than a clean libertarian, a clean hawk, or a clean alignment researcher. You find all three running at once. The libertarian: “I am a big believer in the American private sector,…