[UPDATE] Anthropic Faces a 'Junk' Credit Rating as Its IPO Nears

The company behind Claude is heading into the biggest listing of the year with a mark against its name. Blackstone, the anchor investor in a $63 billion deal to finance Anthropic's chips, has told its own investors it expects the AI firm to receive a rating in the double-B range once it goes public, according to a Financial Times report relayed by TechCrunch. Double-B is the top tier of speculative grade, the category more bluntly known as junk.

It is a notable climb-down. Blackstone had earlier predicted Anthropic would reach investment grade before 2027. A rating one rung below that line changes the arithmetic of the whole business, because it makes borrowing more expensive at exactly the moment Anthropic needs to borrow heavily.

Why a rating matters now

Anthropic has signed a run of enormous compute commitments over the past year, and paying for them depends on raising money cheaply. A junk rating raises the price of that money. The concern is not that the company cannot find capital, but that every billion it draws down to buy chips and cloud capacity costs more to service than an investment-grade borrower would pay.

The figures behind the listing are already outsized. Anthropic filed its public prospectus on October 26, with reporting putting the potential valuation as high as $2 trillion, though at least one analyst has floated a lower range beginning around $1.5 trillion. Third-quarter revenue reportedly reached $16.8 billion. The same filing also recorded a 2025 net loss of roughly $42 billion, most of it a one-off accounting charge rather than cash out the door, a detail we covered when an earlier draft leaked.

The timetable

According to Bloomberg, Anthropic could begin formally marketing the offering as soon as the week of November 9, which would leave room to start trading before the Thanksgiving break. The company plans to list on the Nasdaq.

None of this is the rating itself. The agencies have not spoken, and Blackstone's view is a prediction made to the investors in its financing deal, not a published grade. But it sharpens a question that has followed Anthropic into the public eye: whether a firm losing money at this scale, however deliberately, can fund its ambitions on terms the market finds comfortable. We looked at a related worry, whether the discipline of public markets might force Anthropic to soften its safety commitments, in a recent Myths and Fears piece.