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Anthropic was given a credit rating one notch below investment grade by Kroll Bond Rating this year, marking a good rating for the AI startup despite its limited financial disclosures.
The Claude maker received a double B plus issuer rating from KBRA in June, the highest speculative rating, in the run-up to securing $35 billion in chip financing led by Apollo, according to documents seen by the FT.
The rating development, which was not previously announced, shows that Anthropic is close to achieving investment grade status that would allow the startup to lower its borrowing costs and tap a broader pool of institutional investors, including life insurance companies and pension funds.
Bankers at Anthropic and rival OpenAI have been pressuring the biggest rating agencies to give AI labs investment-grade ratings once they go public. Investors expect this year’s IPO to reach a valuation of more than $2 trillion.
Anthropic plans to spend more than $500 billion on IT resources and infrastructure over the next decade. That effort — which is crucial to continuing an investment boom that has fueled growth in U.S. stock markets — will depend largely on its credit rating once public.
KBRA is a smaller rating agency than Moody’s, S&P and Fitch, which will ultimately determine Anthropic’s credit status after its IPO.
KBRA’s rating was achieved despite Anthropic’s limited financial disclosures. The report was based on certain financial information provided by Anthropic, including revenue, adjusted operating profit and annualized revenue for the first quarter of 2026, as well as internal guidance for second-quarter results, according to the documents.
However, Anthropic’s disclosure to KBRA excluded several important financial metrics, including free cash flow and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Credit rating analysts had to make their own estimates based on assumptions, according to the documents.
Given the limited amount of information, KBRA produced a “risk score” to assess Anthropic’s creditworthiness rather than traditional comprehensive financial models.
KBRA and Anthropic declined to comment.
About $4.4 billion of junior debt in June’s $35 billion financing exposes lenders directly to Anthropic’s credit risk, while the rest was secured by a guarantee from chipmaker Broadcom.
The junior debt received a double B plus rating with stable outlook from KBRA based on its assessment of the AI company’s financials. The debt was sold at a yield of around 8.5 percent, the FT reported at the time, while the senior debt carried an interest rate of 5.75 percent.
Anthropic told investors in a pre-IPO presentation Wednesday that its revenue rose nearly 50 percent to $16.8 billion in the third quarter and that it had been profitable on an adjusted basis for two consecutive quarters.
However, its growth rate has slowed from the blistering pace it set earlier in the year and the latest financial data came in below investors’ most optimistic forecasts from the summer.
At the time of the rating decision, Anthropic estimated second-quarter revenue of $10.9 billion, but that figure was higher than $11.5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
The five-year-old company had no debt on its own balance sheet at the end of June, having relied on more creditworthy business partners and special purpose vehicles for financing.
Anthropic could also issue up to $42 billion in notes that could be converted into stock in the AI lab in the future to pay for semiconductor leases from Broadcom, the sources said.
KBRA has not received detailed terms of the convertible notes, the sources added.
Anthropic’s credit rating is having a significant impact on its upcoming financing efforts, with Wall Street banks beginning to close a $60 billion deal to help the company acquire more of the custom AI chips co-developed by Google and Broadcom. The new debt package would include $18 billion in junior debt backed by Anthropic’s chip rentals.
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