Anthropic is expected to get a junk credit rating after its IPO, Blackstone tells the FT

One of Anthropic's biggest lenders thinks the company's debt will be rated as speculative once it is public. That is the substance of a Financial Times report on October 30, 2026, summarized by TechCrunch, and it is worth separating from what has actually happened.

What was reported

According to TechCrunch's summary of the FT, Blackstone now expects Anthropic to receive a "high" junk rating from credit rating agencies after the IPO. High, here, means the double-B range, the top tier of speculative-grade debt, one step below investment grade. Blackstone had earlier predicted an investment-grade rating before 2027 and has reversed that view.

Blackstone is not a bystander. TechCrunch says it was the anchor investor in a recent $63 billion deal to finance Anthropic's chips, and links to a Wall Street Journal report that Broadcom's chief executive intervened to close that debt deal. We have not opened the FT or WSJ pieces, so we rely on TechCrunch's description of them.

What is missing matters as much. TechCrunch says the report names no rating agencies, gives no figure for Anthropic's total debt, and does not state the size or valuation of the IPO. It describes Blackstone's view as a prediction, not an agency decision. Both Anthropic and Blackstone declined to comment.

What the S-1 does show

Anthropic's own announcement is spare. On October 26, 2026 the company said it had filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed IPO of Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker "ANT." The number of shares and the price range had not been determined, and the statement was not yet effective. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are the named contacts. The filing is on EDGAR under Anthropic, PBC.

The business numbers are strong. TechCrunch's reading of the S-1 gives first-half 2026 revenue of $16.3 billion, up from $1.2 billion in the same period of 2025, and more than 11,900 customers spending at least $100,000 a year as of September 30. Our S-1 breakdown covers the filing in more depth.

A junk-grade forecast alongside those numbers is not a contradiction. Credit ratings measure the odds that a borrower repays on time, not how fast it is growing. A company can double revenue and still carry commitments large enough to worry a lender. TechCrunch notes that the lab has signed large compute deals over the past 12 months, which has worried investors.

Why a rating matters to an AI lab

A credit rating sets the price and availability of debt. Investment-grade borrowers can sell bonds cheaply to a wide pool of buyers, including funds that are barred from lower grades. Speculative-grade borrowers pay more and have a narrower market. TechCrunch frames the risk plainly: a high junk rating would make it harder and more expensive for Anthropic to raise money for its spending.

That matters because the physical race runs on borrowed money. Chips, data centers and power are bought years before the revenue they support arrives. How lenders price that gap is one of the few market signals on how durable the buildout is. Our frontier lab valuations tracker logs the equity side. The debt side is the part that rating agencies will judge.

It is also the part where the S-1's risk language is most pointed. Anthropic wrote that "Any adverse change in demand from our largest customers … could adversely affect our business and prospects." Customer concentration plus large fixed compute commitments is the usual recipe for a cautious rating.

What would change this story

Three events would turn a forecast into a fact. An agency such as S&P Global Ratings, Moody's or Fitch would publish a rating. Anthropic's S-1 amendments or later filings would disclose debt terms. Or the IPO's pricing would show how much equity the company raises and how much it needs to borrow.

We should be careful about the double-B label itself. It is not a distress signal. Double-B borrowers are widely financed and many large companies sit there. The word "junk" is the market's shorthand for speculative grade, and it carries more alarm than the facts here justify.

How lenders and agencies think about a lab like this

Rating agencies look at a few plain things: how predictable the cash flow is, how much of it is already spoken for by fixed payments, and how much cushion exists if revenue growth slows. A company with fast growth but heavy, long-dated compute commitments scores well on the first and poorly on the second. That is the tension a double-B forecast captures. Anthropic's S-1 numbers describe growth. The open question for lenders is the other side of the ledger: what the company owes to chip suppliers, cloud partners and debt holders, and when.

The cloud relationships add a wrinkle. TechCrunch's reading of the S-1 notes that Anthropic sells through Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, holds the direct customer contract and pays each provider a fee, and that those partners, now also competitors, may prioritize their own needs. For a lender, a supplier who is also a rival is another thing to price.

Our take

This is a thin story with a thick implication. The reporting is secondhand, the forecast is one investor's, and no agency has spoken. But the direction of Blackstone's change of mind is informative: a major lender that expected an investment-grade outcome now expects a notch lower, in the same week the company filed to go public.

We would not read it as a verdict on Anthropic's product, which the S-1 shows growing fast. We would read it as a reminder that the superintelligence race is financed like heavy industry, and that heavy industry gets rated. Watch for the first agency publication, the debt disclosures in S-1 amendments, and whether Anthropic or Blackstone responds publicly.