Anthropic may not secure investment-grade rating after IPO, Blackstone says

Blackstone's warning concerns Project North Star, a $63 billion chip financing for Anthropic. More than $42bn of the senior loans is guaranteed by Broadcom, while the other $18 billion rests on Anthropic alone. Blackstone funds took about $9 billion of that slice, at yields above 10%. Separately, Anthropic said in a Form S-1 filing with the SEC that it plans to list on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol "ANT." Blackstone had earlier expected an investment-grade rating by year-end, so the new view is a reversal. Kroll Bond Rating Agency (KBRA) gave Anthropic a BB+ in June, one notch below the line. Bankers for Anthropic and rival OpenAI have also lobbied the largest rating agencies to grant the AI labs investment-grade ratings after their IPOs. SpaceX got investment grade after its IPO. Anthropic may not. For founders, the rating sets the price of debt. An investment-grade credit rating is crucial to those plans because it would allow Anthropic to borrow at lower interest rates. Insurers and pension funds, which represent major sources of institutional capital, often face restrictions on how much below-investment-grade debt they can hold. If the rating stays below the line, financing that leans on a supplier's credit, rather than the borrower's own, is likely to be repeated.