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[NEW YORK/BENGALURU] Anthropic warned it may need to seek more financing sooner than the artificial intelligence company had anticipated while saying little about its potential path to an investment-grade credit rating in its closely watched initial public offering filing.

Reaching investment grade could give the maker of Claude access to a much deeper pool of capital at a time when its funding requirements are ballooning.

Insurance companies, pension funds and other large investors are major buyers of high-grade corporate bonds, and attaining those ratings could allow Anthropic to borrow more cheaply.

SpaceX provides a recent road map for how quickly a newly public technology company can graduate into the high-grade debt market.

When Elon Musk’s company prepared to go public earlier in 2026, SpaceX said it aimed to “maintain an investment grade credit rating” in its filing, and then quickly achieved that grade from Moody’s Ratings, S&P Global Ratings and Fitch Ratings.

The company followed its IPO with a US$25 billion investment-grade bond deal in June, which immediately traded down so much that it stunned lenders. Potential bond buyers are waiting to see Anthropic’s plans.

While Anthropic’s filing does not outline its investment-grade ambitions so clearly, it is shedding new light on the company’s balance sheet, including US$6.2 billion of current debt as of Jun 30.

This is in the form of convertible promissory notes to Amazon, a type of bond that can be converted into equity rather than paid back in cash – and the capacity to borrow tens of billions more.

The documents also reveal details about a five-year US$15 billion revolving credit facility provided by a group of banks led by Morgan Stanley in a September transaction, which increased the size of the package from about US$3 billion earlier.

The deal included guarantees and security interests that would be released if Anthropic wins an investment-grade rating from at least two of the three main credit graders. So far, Moody’s, S&P and Fitch have yet to publish their ratings.

A representative for Anthropic declined to comment

The revolving credit facility would carry interest rates that vary depending on the company’s rating, the filing showed.

Those rates could go from 0.75 percentage point over an underlying benchmark rate for an A credit rating to 1.25 percentage points for a BBB- rating, the lowest of investment grade.

“The state of Anthropic is they have very strong liquidity and extraordinary future obligations,” said Tony Trzcinka, an investment-grade portfolio manager at Impax Asset Management Group.

“The balance sheet supports an investment-grade rating at today’s leverage. However, the rating will come down to how the rating agencies view the commitment schedule, short operating history and circular counterparty relationships.”

Facing massive spending plans to quickly grow its models and compete with the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic has been relying on Broadcom to backstop transactions where a special corporate entity raises debt to buy chips, which are then rented to Anthropic.

The first of such deals, called Big Sky, raised US$35 billion, most of which was supported by Broadcom and received an investment-grade rating. On Monday, Broadcom announced another deal worth US$63 billion to finance the purchase of chips for Anthropic to rent.

Whether through leases or actual on-balance sheet borrowing, the fundraising is just beginning for Anthropic. The company has the option to borrow another US$77 billion of promissory convertible notes, if it so chooses, from Amazon, Broadcom and Alphabet’s Google.

Meanwhile, leases not yet commenced, primarily related to compute and infrastructure capacity, jumped to US$321 billion as at the end of June, up from about US$50 billion at the end of December.

The sheer scale of those obligations makes Anthropic’s eventual credit standing increasingly important.

Wall Street banks, Blackstone line up US$63 billion to finance Broadcom AI chips for Anthropic

Bank of America, Blackstone, Citi and Morgan Stanley will provide US$63 billion in financing to buy Broadcom’s AI chips and networking gear for Anthropic, in one of the largest debt deals tied to the AI build-out.

Rising AI demand is driving massive investment in computing infrastructure as technology companies race to secure capacity for increasingly complex workloads.

The transaction will be carried out through a newly-formed special purpose vehicle that will purchase Broadcom’s AI accelerators and networking equipment and lease them to the Claude maker, the companies said on Monday.

Bank of America, Citi and Morgan Stanley are arranging the first-lien financing, while Blackstone will provide the committed portion of the second-lien financing.

Broadcom is providing “residual value support” to senior debt lenders, effectively providing a guarantee to them in the financing structure, agreeing to absorb potential declines in the value of the assets up to an amount equal to the first-lien debt, although the release did not disclose the size of this debt.

Deliveries are expected to begin in 2027 as part of a previously announced strategic compute capacity agreement involving Broadcom, the companies said.

Apollo and Blackstone had agreed to finance a US$35 billion expansion of Anthropic’s AI computing capacity under a prior agreement with Broadcom.

The latest deal highlights the growing role of banks and alternative asset managers in financing the infrastructure needed to support rising demand for AI computing capacity.

Anthropic filed for a potentially record-breaking IPO on Monday, even as disclosures of steep losses and security concerns threatened to test investor appetite for the AI heavyweight. BLOOMBERG, REUTERS