Anthropic and OpenAI bankers push for top-tier credit ratings post-IPO
Reported: Morgan Stanley and Goldman have been lobbying rating agencies for investment-grade credit for Anthropic and OpenAI after their IPOs, to access the $11.7tn corporate bond market and cut infrastructure borrowing costs. No decisions yet; both remain unprofitable with little positive FCF; analysts still treat them as deep speculative-grade. Precedent: SpaceX got immediate IG post-IPO (unlike Meta/Netflix/Tesla’s decade waits) but its $25bn bonds later sold off. Stakes for partners: Nvidia’s $105bn Ohio OpenAI data-centre credit support ends on a “satisfactory credit rating”; Oracle’s $300bn OpenAI build-out pressures its own IG status; Google/Broadcom extend tens of billions for Anthropic chips. CreditSights: ~$100bn Anthropic IPO raise could help justify IG. Anthropic prospectus expected soon (~$2tn possible); OpenAI IPO eyed next year. Caveat: opaque ARR figures may flatter; Chinese open-weight models are a competitive risk.
Why it matters
Maps the IPO→bond-market financing handoff that unlocks AI infra and could unwind Big Tech guarantees (Nvidia $105bn; Oracle $300bn; Google/Broadcom). Central to how Dealroom-tracked frontier labs fund the next compute cycle — and whether Wall Street rewrites IG norms again after SpaceX.
