Kroll rates Anthropic double B plus, one notch below investment grade
- Kroll Bond Rating Agency gave Anthropic an issuer rating of double B plus in June, the highest speculative-grade score and one notch below investment grade, according to documents the FT saw.
- The rating came in the run-up to a $35bn chip financing led by Apollo.
- Anthropic's disclosure to KBRA left out free cash flow and EBITDA, so analysts made their own estimates and KBRA produced a risk score instead of a full financial model.
- Bankers for Anthropic and OpenAI have lobbied the largest rating agencies for investment-grade ratings once they go public, which would lower borrowing costs and open the door to pension funds and life insurers.
- Anthropic expects to spend more than $500bn on computing and infrastructure over the next decade, and that spending hinges largely on its credit rating once it is public.
Hacker News opinions
Kroll is not one of the big three, and the bond buyers I know mostly look at those. So this is a small shop giving a rating, which says less than the headline makes it sound.
Isn't the bad signal that they went to a smaller agency at all? If the big ones didn't bother, that's a red flag in itself.
The article says Anthropic left out free cash flow and EBITDA, so KBRA had to guess and fell back on a risk score. Hide the bad data and a junk score is what you get.
Subprime was a pile of opaque mortgage pools that everyone assumed were safe. Anthropic debt is at least out in the open since everyone knows the business.
I don't buy the everyman exposure argument. Pension funds and insurers can already buy corporate bonds, and fund managers can judge the risk themselves.
Junk means equity gets crushed first if default risk rises, since they have no positive EBIT or EBITDA. Kroll is not S&P, but the sketchy part is still the sketchy part.
Hyperscalers don't seem to care what the cash costs. If datacenter revenue is growing 40 percent a year, a few points of interest barely matter.
If you really think the upside is unlimited, rising rates shouldn't scare you. My worry is whether the value ends up with Anthropic at all, given DeepSeek and GLM.