Blackstone reportedly expects high junk rating for Anthropic after IPO

What the report says

Anthropic is expected to emerge from its initial public offering with a "high" junk credit rating, according to a Financial Times report relayed by TechCrunch. The forecast comes not from the rating agencies themselves but from Blackstone, the investment firm that anchored a recent $63 billion deal to finance Anthropic's chips. Per the FT, Blackstone told investors in that deal it now expects the AI lab to land in the double B range once it lists — the top tier of speculative-grade debt, the bucket commonly known as junk, sitting just below the investment-grade line that signals low risk to lenders.

A reversal from the anchor investor

Blackstone's view is a prediction rather than a formal assessment, and TechCrunch reports that both Anthropic and Blackstone declined to comment when contacted. What gives the forecast weight is how it has changed. The FT notes that Blackstone had previously told investors in the chip financing the opposite: that the maker of the Claude models would reach investment grade before 2027 arrived. Replacing that expectation with a double B outlook suggests the company's credit profile is being reassessed downward even as it heads toward a listing.

The spending driving the concern

The backdrop is a year of aggressive expansion. TechCrunch reports that Anthropic has spent roughly the past twelve months signing a string of large compute power deals, and that the scale of this has unsettled investors. The $63 billion chip financing that Blackstone anchored is part of that pattern. Sustaining the buildout depends on access to capital, and a speculative-grade rating would make raising that money both harder and more expensive — a compounding problem for a company whose strategy leans on continually acquiring compute capacity.

How junk ratings bite

A junk rating does not lock a company out of debt markets, but it re-prices them. Double B is the strongest grade within speculative territory, yet issuers in that band generally pay higher yields than investment-grade borrowers because lenders demand compensation for taking on more risk. For a business that must repeatedly return to credit markets — or to structured deals like the chip financing — to cover capital spending, every notch below investment grade translates into a lasting increase in the cost of funding.

Why it matters

Anthropic officially filed to go public in the same week, TechCrunch reports, a step that has already set off speculation about how a listing of this size would ripple through the AI industry. Blackstone's revised forecast adds a harder financial signal to that conversation. If the company behind Claude enters public markets rated as junk, it would amount to the market's blunt judgment that even the largest AI labs remain cash-hungry ventures whose enormous infrastructure commitments outweigh dependable earnings for now. That would shape how expensive it is for Anthropic to fund the compute its business runs on, and it gives lenders and investors across the sector a reference point for pricing risk in an industry built on heavy spending against promised future revenue.