Anthropic is expected to receive a high speculative-grade credit rating, commonly called a junk rating, from credit agencies after it goes public, according to a Financial Times report summarized by TechCrunch on October 30. The FT reported that Blackstone, the anchor investor in a recent $63 billion deal to finance chips for Anthropic, told investors in that deal it expects a rating in the BB range after the IPO. Anthropic and Blackstone both declined to comment to TechCrunch.

Lens did not open the FT article itself. This account relies on TechCrunch’s summary of it, on Dealroom and Reuters summaries of earlier FT reporting about Anthropic’s credit standing, and on CNBC’s reading of the company’s IPO prospectus. A rating forecast from one investor is not a rating, and the sources Lens opened do not report any rating from Moody’s, S&P or Fitch.

What the report says

TechCrunch, in a short item by Lucas Ropek, says Blackstone expects a rating in the BB range, which it describes as the highest tier of speculative-grade debt. The FT’s report, as TechCrunch relays it, notes that Blackstone had earlier predicted an investment-grade rating for Anthropic before 2027. The article calls the new view “just a prediction.”

TechCrunch adds that a lower rating would make it more difficult and costlier for Anthropic to raise money, and that the money funds heavy spending. Over the past 12 months the company has signed large compute-power deals, which TechCrunch says has worried investors. Anthropic formally filed for its IPO earlier the same week, on October 26.

A rating already exists, from a smaller agency

The forecast follows earlier FT reporting on Anthropic’s credit standing. According to a Dealroom summary of the FT’s October 16 article, documents seen by the FT show that Kroll Bond Rating Agency, known as KBRA, assigned Anthropic an issuer rating of BB+ in June 2026. That is one notch below investment grade and the highest speculative grade. KBRA and Anthropic declined to comment, and the page notes that KBRA is smaller than Moody’s, S&P and Fitch.

The summary says KBRA used a risk score rather than full financial models. Anthropic supplied first-quarter revenue, adjusted operating income, its annualized run rate and an internal second-quarter forecast, but not free cash flow or EBITDA, so analysts estimated those figures. The summary describes the rating as resting on limited disclosure that the company selected. Merca2, a Spanish outlet also summarizing the FT, says KBRA called the rating strong for a startup with a short accounting history, and that Moody’s, S&P and Fitch have not yet rated Anthropic and are expected to do so after the IPO.

The financing that depends on it

Anthropic’s chips are financed largely through partners and special-purpose vehicles rather than its own balance sheet. The Dealroom summary of the FT says Anthropic had no debt on its own balance sheet as of late June. It describes a $35 billion chip financing led by Apollo, in which about $4.4 billion of junior debt exposed to Anthropic’s credit risk was rated BB+ with a stable outlook by KBRA and sold at a yield of roughly 8.5%, while the remainder was guaranteed by Broadcom and the senior debt priced at 5.75%.

The same summary says Anthropic could issue up to $42 billion of convertible notes to pay for leasing Broadcom semiconductors, and that Wall Street banks were assembling a $60 billion deal for custom AI chips from Google and Broadcom, including $18 billion of junior debt backed by Anthropic’s chip rent payments. TechCrunch’s $63 billion figure for the Blackstone-anchored deal is higher than this $60 billion; the sources do not explain the difference.

On October 16, Reuters relayed an FT report that Anthropic was offering Blackstone a yield of more than 10% on $9 billion of debt, to be repaid from Anthropic’s lease payments on chips over five years. Reuters said it could not immediately verify the report.

Crypto Briefing, in a September 8 article, reported that Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H round in late May at a $965 billion post-money valuation, and that Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup were putting together a $15 billion revolving credit facility before the IPO. Lens found those two figures in that outlet only.

The push for a better grade

A September 8 Dealroom summary of FT reporting says Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have pressed rating agencies to give Anthropic and OpenAI investment-grade ratings after their IPOs. The aim, it says, is access to the $11.7 trillion corporate bond market and lower borrowing costs for infrastructure. It adds that no decisions had been made and that analysts still treated both companies as deep speculative-grade, because they are unprofitable and generate little positive free cash flow.

The same summary points to SpaceX, which it says received investment-grade status immediately after its IPO, unlike Meta, Netflix and Tesla, which waited about a decade. It also cites CreditSights as saying an IPO raise of about $100 billion for Anthropic could help justify an investment-grade rating. The page notes partner exposure: Google and Broadcom are extending tens of billions of dollars in support for Anthropic’s chips.

What the prospectus shows

Anthropic’s preliminary S-1 prospectus, more than 300 pages long, became public on October 26, CNBC reports. It shows revenue of $16.29 billion in the first half of 2026, against $1.16 billion in the first half of 2025, according to an analyst comparison cited by CNBC, and cost of revenue of $2.38 billion, which implies a gross margin of about 85%. The filing says substantially all of its cost of revenue relates to compute and infrastructure, and that the company has “historically operated in a compute-constrained environment.”

Startups.com.br, a Brazilian outlet citing the filing, reports a first-half net loss of $80.75 billion that it says is mostly due to accounting effects, a 2025 loss of $42 billion on revenue of $4.6 billion, and planned cloud spending of more than $450 billion over the coming years. It says about one-fifth of revenue comes from two customers. Merca2 also reports a 2025 loss above $42 billion. Lens found the $80.75 billion figure only in the Startups.com.br report and did not see it in CNBC’s account.

On control, CNBC reports that seven co-founders, including Chief Executive Dario Amodei, hold a single Class F share that carries 50.1% of the votes on matters put to shareholders, and that Anthropic is a public benefit corporation. The IPO price has not been set. CNBC says analysts estimate a valuation between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. Startups.com.br says market talk puts the amount to be raised at about $100 billion, which Anthropic has not confirmed.

Why the rating matters

Lens analysis: the rating matters because Anthropic’s growth depends on compute that it pays for over years. CNBC reports the company has said it sought more computing capacity than its cloud partners were willing to provide. A speculative-grade rating would raise the price of the financing used to lease that capacity, and the structures described so far show that guarantees from partners such as Broadcom can lift the quality of parts of the debt even when the company’s own credit sits below investment grade.

Futurum Group’s Nick Patience said, in CNBC’s account, that the split between training future models and serving customers will decide future margins, while Morningstar’s Michael Field raised questions about a slowdown in growth the filing does not explain. Those are the same measures an agency would weigh.

What to watch

The IPO price and valuation are not yet set, and Startups.com.br reports an Axios claim that shares could begin trading before U.S. Thanksgiving, which has not been confirmed. After listing, Moody’s, S&P and Fitch are expected to publish their own ratings, according to Merca2. Whether bankers’ lobbying for investment-grade treatment succeeds is not known.

The central question is the gap between Blackstone’s earlier expectation of an investment-grade rating by 2027 and its present BB forecast. The sources Lens opened do not say what changed Blackstone’s view, and Blackstone declined to comment.

Sources

Image: Skyscrapers of the Embarcadero from Harry Bridges Plaza, San Francisco.jpg by Aos.1905, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Illustrative photo; it does not show the events described.