A company seeking a $2 trillion IPO valuation just got told by its own financial partner that credit agencies will likely rate it as speculative.
The math on Anthropic’s future just got harder.
The Financial Times reported Thursday that Blackstone, the anchor investor in Anthropic’s massive $63 billion chip financing deal, has told investors it now expects Anthropic to receive a “high junk” credit rating after its IPO.
Specifically, a BB-range rating, the top tier of speculative grade. That’s below investment grade.
Below what pension funds and insurance companies typically touch.
This is a reversal.
Blackstone had previously told investors the opposite: that Anthropic would secure an investment-grade rating before 2027.
Both Anthropic and Blackstone declined to comment.
What a Junk Rating Actually Means
Credit ratings sound abstract until they affect the cost of money. Here’s why this matters.
Anthropic has publicly committed to spending more than $800 billion on computing infrastructure through 2045.
That spending depends on being able to borrow cheaply. An investment-grade rating means access to a deep pool of institutional lenders at reasonable interest rates.
A junk rating shrinks that pool and raises the cost of every dollar borrowed.
Pension funds, insurance companies, and many institutional investors have mandates that prevent them from holding junk-rated debt. A BB rating doesn’t lock Anthropic out of debt markets entirely. But it limits who can lend and at what price.
Kroll Bond Rating Agency already gave Anthropic a BB+ in June, one notch below investment grade.
Fitch, Moody’s, and S&P have yet to issue formal ratings. If the major agencies land in the same range, Blackstone’s warning will have been accurate.
$112 Billion in Cash, $80 Billion in Losses
Here’s what makes this awkward. Anthropic isn’t broke.
It holds more than $112 billion in cash and equivalents.
Its S-1 filing, which went public earlier this week, shows $16.3 billion in first-half 2026 revenue.
But it also shows an $80.7 billion net loss for the same period. Revenue is growing fast. Losses are growing faster. Credit agencies look at that trajectory and see risk, regardless of the cash pile.
A US technology-focused portfolio manager told the Financial Times that credit access was “central” to the company’s financing ambitions.
That’s the polite version of saying the whole plan falls apart if borrowing gets expensive enough.
The Spending Is Already Happening
Anthropic isn’t theoretically planning to spend big.
It’s already doing it.
The $63 billion Project North Star deal finances chip purchases through Broadcom, with Blackstone’s funds providing $9 billion of junior debt at yields above 10%.
The company’s S-1 also mentions up to $42 billion in additional notes to Broadcom or a designated financial partner for 2026 lease arrangements.
This is infrastructure spending at sovereign scale.
The compute requirements for training and serving Fable and Mythos-class models are enormous and growing.
A company that just called for pacing the frontier is simultaneously locking in decades of infrastructure commitments that only make sense if growth never slows down.
The IPO Timing Gets Trickier
Anthropic officially filed its S-1 earlier this week.
Reports suggest the listing could happen as soon as November.
The company has been seeking a valuation between $1.5 and $2 trillion.
A junk rating doesn’t necessarily kill the IPO.
Plenty of companies go public with speculative-grade credit.
But it creates a messaging problem.
How do you ask equity investors to pay $2 trillion for a company that debt investors rate as speculative?
The equity story says “generational opportunity.” The credit story says “we’re not sure they can service their borrowing.”
Those are two very different assessments of the same company. Public market investors will notice.
The Broader AI Lab Problem
This isn’t just an Anthropic story.
It’s a preview of what happens when AI labs built for growth at any cost finally meet the credit markets.
OpenAI is raising $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation right now.
It lost $9 billion in 2025.
Neither company has demonstrated profitability at scale.
Both are spending faster than they’re earning. Both are asking investors to believe that the revenue will eventually catch up to the infrastructure.
Equity investors have been willing to make that bet.
Credit investors, whose job is to assess whether they’ll get paid back, are sending a different signal. When Blackstone, the anchor investor in your chip financing, tells people your credit will be junk, that signal is hard to ignore.
Anthropic’s S-1 is public. The IPO roadshow is presumably next.
And somewhere in every investor meeting, someone is going to ask the same question the credit agencies are asking: at what point does revenue catch up to spending?
The company has $112 billion in cash.
It has Fable, Mythos, and Opus generating real enterprise revenue.
It has a safety story that differentiates it from OpenAI. It even has a draft federal safety bill to prove it takes governance seriously.
Whether all of that is enough to overcome a “junk” label on the credit side is the question this IPO will answer.
