Anthropic IPO faces "high junk" credit rating despite massive compute spend and soaring revenues

Blackstone has warned investors that Anthropic may receive a below-investment-grade credit rating once it lists, reversing earlier expectations, according to the Financial Times. The AI developer is expected to land in the BB range, the top tier of speculative grade, which could raise its borrowing costs and narrow the pool of institutional lenders able to hold its debt. Documents reported by the FT show Kroll Bond Rating Agency already assigned Anthropic a BB+ issuer rating in June 2026, one notch below investment grade.

The rating question sits against the numbers in the S-1 filed on October 26. First-half 2026 revenue reached $16.3 billion, up more than 1,300% year over year, while the net loss was $80.7 billion. Most of that loss is non-cash: Fortune reports that $72.4 billion of it came from an accounting charge. The bigger long-run commitment is compute, with planned spending of more than $800 billion through 2045.

How that spend gets financed is where the rating bites. Anthropic's $63 billion Project North Star financing leans heavily on guarantees from investment-grade AVGO, and the company reportedly holds over $112 billion in cash with room to raise another $100 billion in the IPO. A junk rating would make each future dollar of unguaranteed debt more expensive, which pushes more of the funding burden onto equity and partner balance sheets.

The split is stark: equity investors see revenue compounding at a pace few companies have ever reported, while credit investors see a compute bill that dwarfs current revenue. Valuation chatter has cooled toward roughly $1.7 trillion. Watch for the agencies' final ratings at listing, the terms of any new debt, and whether more of the build-out shifts onto partner guarantees such as Broadcom's.