Blackstone now expects a junk rating for Anthropic after its IPO

The Financial Times reports a shift at Blackstone, one of Anthropic's largest debt backers. The firm now expects a lower credit rating after the IPO. The paper credits the shift to a note Blackstone sent its own investors.

The report was published on 30 October 2026. The authors are Michelle Chan in New York and George Hammond in San Francisco. It sits behind the Financial Times paywall. The three facts below are the paper's. Everything else in this piece is context.

What Blackstone told its investors

The Financial Times says Blackstone had earlier told investors Anthropic would get an investment-grade rating before year end. According to the paper, Blackstone has now walked that back. Its new guidance is that a rating in the "double B range or above" is more likely.

A double B rating sits below investment grade. It is often called junk. The Financial Times also reports that Fitch, Moody's and S&P have not rated Anthropic. The paper says Blackstone, Anthropic and the three agencies all declined to comment.

Why the label matters

A credit rating acts as a label that controls who can lend to the company. Many pension funds and insurance companies cannot hold large junk-bond positions. So the pool of lenders shrinks. The price of borrowed money rises in step. The rating tells you which lenders may buy the bonds. The strength of the business is a different question.

Anthropic has filed for an IPO on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, as earlier filings showed. The scale of the plan matters here. The gap between investment grade and junk is paid on every dollar borrowed. The Financial Times reports that Blackstone funds put nine billion dollars into a chip financing deal for Anthropic. The yield was more than ten percent.

For a frontier model company, the dollars that pay for compute change the training schedule most directly. A one or two percent swing on the borrowing rate is real money. It either buys more GPUs or does not.

What a reader should take from this

The Financial Times is one paywalled outlet with a Blackstone memo. The three big agencies have not spoken. There is no quote from Anthropic. Treat the figures above as what Blackstone is telling its investors today. They are not the rating Anthropic will have on IPO day.

For a buyer of AI work, the signal in this report is simpler. The companies at the frontier are now borrowing at a scale no software company has reached before. The price of that borrowing is a thing to watch alongside benchmarks and model releases. The next move will come from one of the three big agencies, and that is still ahead.

Source

• Anthropic may not secure investment-grade rating after IPO, Blackstone tells investors, Financial Times by Michelle Chan and George Hammond.