Anthropic expected to receive high ‘junk’ rating from credit agencies following IPO, report says

The forecast comes from Blackstone, the investment giant that served as anchor investor in a recent $63 billion deal financing Anthropic's chips. Blackstone told investors in that deal that it expects the Claude maker to receive a "high" junk rating once it is public. Both Anthropic and Blackstone declined to comment when TechCrunch reached out.

That marks a shift in Blackstone's own outlook. Previously, the firm had said Anthropic would earn an investment-grade rating — the tier signaling low risk to lenders — before 2027. The new expectation is a double-B range rating, the top rung of speculative "junk" grade, which still sits below investment grade.

Blackstone's view is a prediction rather than a decision by rating agencies, but the stakes are concrete. A junk-level rating would make it harder and more expensive for Anthropic to raise the capital needed to sustain the spending that has powered its business growth. The lab has been on a spending spree over the past 12 months, signing large compute power agreements that have already worried some investors.

Those concerns sit alongside an IPO that has already begun rippling through the sector. Anthropic officially filed to go public earlier this week, prompting widespread speculation about how such a large listing will reshape the broader AI industry.

What remains open is whether rating agencies themselves land in the double-B range, how that pricing flows into Anthropic's next rounds of debt financing, and whether the compute commitments that have driven its cash burn get restructured or doubled down on after the listing. Also unresolved: how much the eventual rating and IPO terms influence the fundraising calculus of Anthropic's rivals, several of which have leaned on similar debt-and-equity combinations to fund chips and data centers.