Blackstone has told investors it now expects Anthropic to receive a "high" junk credit rating from rating agencies following the AI lab's initial public offering, reversing a prior forecast that the Claude-maker would secure an investment-grade rating before 2027, the Financial Times reported1,2.
Blackstone, the anchor investor in a recent $63 billion deal to finance Anthropic's chips, expects a double-B-range rating — the top tier of speculative-grade debt. Both Anthropic and Blackstone declined to comment when contacted by TechCrunch.
A junk rating, even at the high end, raises borrowing costs and narrows the pool of institutional buyers willing to hold a company's debt. Anthropic has been accumulating large compute-power commitments over the past twelve months, a spending pace that has already drawn investor concern.
ANALYSIS The revised outlook from Anthropic's own infrastructure financier carries particular weight: Blackstone is not a disinterested credit analyst but the party underwriting the chip-financing deal, making its reassessment a signal rooted in direct exposure to the company's cash-flow trajectory.
Anthropic officially filed to go public earlier the same week, according to TechCrunch's reporting. The filing set off speculation about how the IPO would affect the broader AI industry.
ANALYSIS A double-B rating would place Anthropic's debt in the same band typically occupied by companies with meaningful revenue but unproven profitability at scale — a bracket that could constrain the lab's ability to match the infrastructure commitments it has already made.