Anthropic has held a speculative-grade credit rating from Kroll Bond Rating Agency since June that had not previously been made public, according to documents reviewed by the Financial Times and reported on October 16.
The agency assigned the company a BB+ rating with a stable outlook, the highest rung of speculative grade and one step below investment grade. The rating applies to about 4.4 billion dollars of subordinated debt within a 35 billion dollar financing led by Apollo Global, according to the report. The subordinated notes carry a yield of about 8.5 percent, while the senior debt pays a coupon of 5.75 percent.
The gap between those two yields is the market’s judgment about where a claim sits in the capital structure. Subordinated lenders are paid after senior lenders and before equity, and they price the additional risk in the spread. A company whose senior debt pays under six percent and whose junior debt pays eight and a half is being financed at a cost that reflects its stage and its collateral rather than its growth rate.
The methodology the agency used is the detail worth noting. Because Anthropic did not provide figures for free cash flow or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, the agency applied a risk-scoring approach and estimated the missing measures itself. Rating agencies do not typically decide how to assess a company that withholds data; they apply a framework and disclose the limitation, and the resulting grade carries less information than one built on audited statements.
The structure of the financing explains why a developer of software models is being assessed like an industrial borrower. The money funds computing capacity, which is bought under multiyear contracts and secured against equipment that depreciates quickly. That is a profile closer to a shipping company or an airline than to a software business, and the lenders price it accordingly.
Wall Street banks are already preparing a further debt package of about 60 billion dollars for the company, including 18 billion dollars of subordinated notes, according to the report. A borrower returning to the market within months of a large financing is either expanding faster than planned or refinancing terms it expects to worsen, and the composition of the package, with a larger junior tranche, suggests the second possibility is being hedged against.
The rating also matters for investors considering the company’s equity. A published credit opinion is a second opinion on the same business, produced by an organization whose incentive is to be right about default risk rather than about growth. Equity buyers who read the rating learn what a lender thinks of the cash flows, which is the part of the story that a revenue multiple conceals.
For the lenders, the collateral and the contracts are the analysis. Graphics processors have a resale market, though their value falls with each generation, and computing contracts have terms that determine who bears the cost if demand changes. A credit committee that approves a loan against that collateral is underwriting the durability of demand for model training, not the quality of the models.
Interest costs accumulate against future revenue. A company paying roughly eight and a half percent on billions of dollars of junior debt needs margins that cover that expense before it produces a return for shareholders, and the expense is fixed while revenue is not. That is the trade a capital-intensive business makes when it borrows against expectations.
The report’s significance is partly about disclosure. An unrated company that borrows privately discloses what its lenders require, and rating agencies publish opinions that borrowers may prefer to keep quiet. The rating was assigned in June and surfaced in October, which is the interval over which private credit arrangements become visible.
Analysts said the rating places the company in the same category as other heavily indebted borrowers in the computing supply chain, including some of the operators that lease it capacity. A wave of downgrades or defaults among data center developers would affect the cost of capital for their customers, and the interconnection between the two is the risk that credit investors are pricing.
The lending structure also spreads risk beyond the company. Apollo led the financing and will distribute much of it to insurers, pension funds and other institutional buyers looking for yield above what government debt pays. Those buyers hold exposure to a business whose cash flows depend on computing demand, and many of them have limited capacity to assess that risk directly.
For the company’s equity story, the rating underlines that the business is financed like infrastructure rather than like software. Revenue arrives per token consumed, and the cost of serving it is committed years in advance, so the two sides of the income statement move on different schedules. That mismatch is what credit agencies assess and what a cash flow statement eventually shows.
