Anthropic and OpenAI bankers push for top-tier credit ratings post-IPO

Anthropic and OpenAI’s bankers are lobbying for an investment-grade credit rating after their upcoming initial public offerings, a designation that would lower the borrowing costs for their ambitious AI infrastructure plans.

Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have held talks with credit rating agencies in recent weeks on behalf of the two leading AI labs, as they look to gain access to the $11.7tn corporate bond market post-IPO, said people familiar with the matter.

Analysts at the rating agencies told the FT that bankers acting for Anthropic and OpenAI had argued that the two companies’ public listings would unlock vast amounts of liquidity and improve the health of their balance sheets.

“Wall Street is trying to minimise their overall debt impact by arguing that these two companies will soon be flush with liquidity,” said one senior credit analyst.

Achieving an investment-grade rating from Fitch, Moody’s and S&P soon after going public would be a remarkable feat for the two lossmaking AI labs, unlocking big benefits for the companies and their infrastructure partners including Oracle and Nvidia.

The rating would open the door to pension funds, insurers and other institutional investors that take far more limited positions in riskier speculative-grade debt.

It would provide another example of Wall Street changing longstanding practices to usher in the three largest IPOs in history. SpaceX, which went public in June, was the first large tech company to receive an immediate investment-grade rating.

Elon Musk’s rocket conglomerate also benefited from changes to index rules that meant billions of dollars in passive investment tracking the S&P 500 and Nasdaq immediately flowed into its stock.

Previous tech heavyweights such as Meta, Netflix and Tesla waited a decade or more after their listings to get a top-tier credit rating.

The discussions about OpenAI and Anthropic’s ratings are ongoing and no final decisions have been made, the people said. Both companies have yet to publicly lay out their IPO roadmap.

Anthropic, OpenAI, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Moody’s and S&P all declined to comment. Fitch did not respond to a request for comment.

Anthropic and OpenAI have recently arranged substantial credit lines with big banks but have mainly relied on institutional and venture capital investors to finance their hundreds of billions of dollars in spending on specialist chips and data centres to train and run their models.

Both labs have also leaned on the investment-grade rating of partners to secure preferential borrowing terms for debt tied to their infrastructure projects.

However, concern over the mounting debt load tied to AI projects has pushed up borrowing costs in recent months. An investment-grade rating would give the companies access to a broader pool of capital and obtain better borrowing terms.

Analysts at rating agencies are waiting to see the results of their IPOs before reaching a decision. The two companies remain unprofitable and have shown little sign of generating positive free cash flow. They also face growing risks, including the popularity of Chinese open-weight models.

“We still treat OpenAI and Anthropic as deep in speculative grade . . . they are in the red,” said another senior credit analyst.

The credit ratings of OpenAI and Anthropic are important to their Big Tech partners, which have taken on hundreds of billions of dollars in guarantees on the assumption that both labs will soon be able to borrow on their own.

Nvidia’s $105bn of credit support for a massive OpenAI data centre in Ohio terminates when the start-up wins a “satisfactory credit rating”, filings show.

A ratings bump could also help Oracle refinance some of its current debt pile after raising funds to fulfil a $300bn data centre build-out for OpenAI that has put it at risk of losing its investment-grade status following a recent downgrade.

Google and Broadcom have similarly extended tens of billions of dollars in credit support to back Anthropic’s use of their chips, with both companies betting that it will need less help after its IPO.

Broadcom chief executive Hock Tan said last week that Anthropic’s listing meant its “investment credit will change”, noting that along with rival OpenAI, they were “growing to be hyperscalers in their own right”.

He described the frontier AI labs as “two geniuses in the middle of Outer Mongolia, and they need to go to college . . . So we do what we can to help them. And part of it is creating sources of financing to help.”

Jordan Chalfin, head of technology at research firm CreditSights, wrote last week that Anthropic’s rapid revenue growth could help justify an investment-grade rating if it raised roughly $100bn in its IPO.

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Anthropic is expected to unveil its IPO prospectus soon, allowing investors to pore over its finances ahead of a listing that could value the five-year-old company at $2tn or more. OpenAI is expected to follow suit with an IPO next year.

Analysts said opaque finances and the start-ups’ use of flattering annual recurring revenue figures have masked their actual performance.

“Both companies have not provided concrete details,” one credit analyst said.

SpaceX issued $25bn in bonds days after it went public and received its investment-grade credit rating from all three rating agencies in June. S&P at the time said the rating reflected the “solid foundation” that the rocket maker had built through its launch business and Starlink satellites.

However, SpaceX’s bonds sold off shortly after being issued, which could also serve as a cautionary tale for credit investors.

“Those deals performed very poorly,” said Andrzej Skiba, head of US fixed income at RBC Global Asset Management. “It makes sense to take a bit more time to introduce themselves to debt holders before printing paper.”