Blackstone Expects Anthropic to Leave Its IPO With a High Junk Credit Rating, FT Reports

Anthropic is expected to receive a high junk credit rating from the major agencies after its initial public offering, according to a Financial Times report published Friday. Blackstone, the anchor investor in the company's $63 billion financing deal for chips, told investors in the transaction that it expects the Claude maker to land in the double-B range — the top tier of speculative grade — following the listing. That is a striking reversal: Blackstone had previously told investors it expected Anthropic to achieve an investment-grade rating before 2027.

The financing in question, internally called Project North Star, is one of the largest debt raises ever assembled for an AI company. More than $42 billion of senior loans are guaranteed by chip supplier Broadcom, and $18 billion of subordinated debt has already been rated BB-plus with a positive outlook by KBRA and BB by Morningstar DBRS — both firmly speculative. Blackstone funds invested $9 billion of that subordinated tranche at a yield exceeding 10 percent. The three big agencies — S&P, Moody's and Fitch — have not yet assigned Anthropic a public rating, which is why the secondary agencies' marks are the only hard data points so far.

The stakes are unusually high because of what Anthropic plans to do with borrowed money. Its S-1, filed publicly on October 26 ahead of an IPO expected as soon as next month, projects more than $800 billion of spending on computing infrastructure by 2045. The company holds more than $112 billion in cash and equivalents, and investors expect the IPO itself to raise roughly $100 billion. But the filing also laid out tens of billions in annual compute commitments, and closing that gap will require repeated access to bond markets at palatable rates.

A junk rating would sharply narrow the buyer base. Many insurers, pension funds and other large institutional holders are restricted from owning speculative-grade debt in size, which would push Anthropic back toward supplier-supported structures — loans guaranteed by the vendors selling it chips — to keep borrowing costs manageable. TechCrunch reached out to Anthropic and Blackstone for comment; both declined.

Blackstone's forecast is a prediction, not a rating action, and the actual marks from the major agencies could come in better. But the direction of travel matters for the whole sector. AI labs have spent two years converting vendor credits, special-purpose vehicles and private credit into compute capacity, on the assumption that scale would eventually earn them investment-grade treatment. If the largest AI debt deal ever assembled tops out in the BB range, the cost of that assumption is about to get priced in public — right around the time Anthropic's IPO forces the market to put a hard number on the sector's most indebted champion.