Mario Draghi’s newly launched Rhine Group, aimed at restoring Europe’s technological edge and reducing its reliance on foreign powers, has already been called out for some choices: A headquarters in Switzerland, a website running entirely on US tech infrastructure and the inclusion of Leopold Aschenbrenner, the 24-year-old German AI investor whose heavily leveraged hedge fund collapsed in late July 2026.
The Rhine Group, co-chaired by the former European Central Bank president alongside Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, was unveiled on August 24 as a high-profile think tank of economists, entrepreneurs, academics and business leaders.
Its stated aim is to turn Draghi’s 2024 competitiveness report into concrete reforms that reverse Europe’s relative decline in technology, productivity and innovation.
Day-to-day direction falls to Luis Garicano, a Spanish economist at the London School of Economics and a former MEP, who is listed as executive director.
Aschenbrenner’s inclusion comes after a turbulent two years.
Fired from OpenAI’s superalignment team in April 2024 amid a disputed claim of leaking internal information, he published a lengthy essay, Situational Awareness, that predicted rapid advances toward artificial general intelligence and attracted attention in Silicon Valley.
He then launched an AI-focused hedge fund of the same name with no prior professional investing experience. Its anchor backers included Patrick and John Collison, the brothers who founded Stripe, alongside Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross and the trading firm Jane Street.
The fund grew rapidly through highly leveraged bets, at one point managing assets of about $45 billion (€38.6 billion) and posting returns of 439 per cent net in the first half of 2026, according to an investor letter reported by the Financial Times.
A sell-off in AI-related stocks triggered margin calls from lenders in late July 2026.
Aschenbrenner was forced into a rapid fire-sale of much of the fund’s public equity portfolio to Citadel, the firm run by Ken Griffin, at a discount.
The episode wiped about $35 billion (€30 billion) from the fund’s value, prompted an apology to investors and left the fund a fraction of its former size, with holdings of roughly $10 billion (€8.6 billion), according to CNBC.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission has since sent subpoenas to banks that handled the fund’s trading and lending, the New York Times reported on August 24, 2026. The fund has not been accused of wrongdoing.
His presence so soon after the fund’s abrupt and highly public unravelling has drawn comment, not least because Collison, who co-chairs the Rhine Group, was among its early backers.
The choice of Aschenbrenner is one of several early points of tension for a project that presents itself as a serious vehicle for European strategic autonomy.
According to reporting in Euractiv‘s Rapporteur newsletter, the Rhine Group is headquartered in Switzerland. Its own legal notice confirms as much, describing an association set up under the Swiss Civil Code with a registered office at a trust company in Geneva and governed by Swiss law.
Its website is built and hosted entirely on US infrastructure. The same notice states that the platform comes from Webflow of San Francisco, that hosting is provided by Amazon Web Services with primary servers in Northern Virginia, and that content delivery runs through Fastly nodes in Europe and worldwide.
The membership list has also drawn criticism for its geographical imbalance.
Of the 55 members, there are no representatives from Poland and only one from the countries that joined the European Union in 2004 or later, the former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves.
Several members hold senior roles at US-based or US-linked firms, including Mastercard, Morgan Stanley, General Catalyst and General Atlantic. Co-chair Patrick Collison’s Stripe itself maintains a significant San Francisco presence.
