Anthropic Expected to Receive High Junk Rating After IPO
Anthropic is expected to receive a high junk credit rating from the major rating agencies after its initial public offering, the Financial Times reported on October 30, 2026. TechCrunch carried the report, which said Blackstone told investors in the financing that it expects Anthropic to receive a “high” junk rating after its IPO.
Blackstone was the anchor investor in a $63 billion deal to finance Anthropic’s chips. The same report says the firm had previously said Anthropic would receive an investment-grade rating before 2027. It now expects a rating in the double-B range, the top tier of speculative, or junk, grade. Neither Anthropic nor Blackstone commented on the expected rating when approached by TechCrunch.
The IPO process is moving. Anthropic has officially filed to go public, and Reuters reported that its U.S. IPO filing was made public on October 26, 2026. Bloomberg has reported that Anthropic’s valuation has surged from $183 billion.
The financial disclosures add context to the rating discussion. Reuters reported that Anthropic’s net loss in the first half of 2026 widened to $80.7 billion, and that the loss was largely due to a non-operating item related to bonds. Separately, the Financial Times reported that Anthropic is offering Blackstone a yield of more than 10% in its latest chip financing. Yield here is the annual return the lender receives, expressed as a percentage of the amount lent.
The ratings history is also relevant. According to the Financial Times, Anthropic was assigned the highest junk credit rating in June. Kroll Bond Rating Agency, a smaller firm than Moody’s, S&P and Fitch, assigned Anthropic a rating one notch below investment grade. The FT reported that Moody’s, S&P and Fitch will ultimately determine the company’s credit status after the IPO, and that those three agencies carry the most influence over companies’ borrowing costs. Earlier, the FT reported that Anthropic and OpenAI’s bankers were lobbying for an investment-grade rating following their upcoming IPOs.
In my view, the gap between those lobbying goals and the rating now expected is the central tension of this story. A company that finances compute-heavy infrastructure with outside capital depends on its credit profile, and that profile sets the price of the debt behind it. A junk rating does not by itself stop a company from borrowing, but it generally raises the cost of doing so. The yield terms in recent chip financing suggest that cost is already significant for Anthropic.
The broader context here is that the rating is still a projection. Blackstone’s expectation, as reported, is a forecast from an investor in a private financing. The formal determination rests with Moody’s, S&P and Fitch, and their assessments will come after the offering.
The wider question for the sector is less about the label than about what it does to the economics of AI infrastructure. If the largest model developers must pay speculative-grade rates to fund capacity, the spread between the cost of capital and the returns on that capacity becomes the figure to watch. Investors who buy the IPO will be buying into that arithmetic as much as into the model roadmap.
