Blackstone now expects Anthropic to receive a “high” junk credit rating after its public listing, the Financial Times reports. That means a double-B grade, the top tier of speculative. It reverses what the firm said earlier, which was that the Claude maker would reach investment grade before 2027.
Blackstone is the anchor investor in a $63 billion deal to finance Anthropic’s chips, and the FT says it gave the new view to investors in that deal. Anthropic filed to go public earlier this week.
The financing was announced on 26 October. By reports, a new vehicle buys Broadcom chips and networking equipment and leases them to Anthropic, so the borrowing sits against hardware the company does not own.
A junk rating matters because it makes borrowing harder and dearer. TechCrunch notes that it would complicate raising the money to keep paying for the compute commitments Anthropic has piled up over the past 12 months, which have worried investors. Anthropic and Blackstone both declined to comment to TechCrunch.
The filing showed $16.3 billion of revenue in six months, so the rating question is about the cost of the commitments rather than the sales.
The forecast is Blackstone’s, not a rating agency’s. No agency has yet rated the company as a listed borrower, and the grade will be set on figures that include the $80.7 billion net loss in its filing for the first half.
The FT’s account is the only one so far. What nobody has said is what Blackstone saw between its first forecast and its second.
