Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have held recent talks with major credit rating agencies on behalf of Anthropic and OpenAI, seeking investment-grade ratings to take effect immediately after the companies’ planned stock-market listings, the Financial Times reported.
The banks argue that such ratings would open access to the roughly $11.7 trillion corporate bond market. According to their case, a public listing would provide substantial liquidity and improve balance-sheet metrics, enabling cheaper financing for rapid and costly infrastructure investments.
Why the rating matters
Investment-grade ratings from Fitch, Moody’s and S&P would allow pension funds, insurers and other conservative institutional investors to allocate to these issuers—investors that typically limit exposure to speculative-grade debt. Achieving that status would be notable for two currently loss-making companies that do not yet display positive free cash flow. For earlier tech giants like Meta, Netflix or Tesla, reaching comparable credit standing took a decade or more.
There is a precedent: SpaceX received immediate investment-grade ratings from all three major agencies following its June IPO.
Banks and corporate partners try to reduce risks
Wall Street argues the post-IPO liquidity will mitigate accumulated debt risks. In addition, several large corporate partners have made significant commitments that depend on improved credit profiles:
- Nvidia has provided a $105 billion loan guarantee for OpenAI’s Ohio data-center investment; the guarantee would terminate automatically if OpenAI attains a satisfactory credit rating.
- Oracle is financing an approximately $300 billion data-center project for OpenAI, and changes in credit assessment could have material implications for Oracle’s own investment-grade status after a prior downgrade.
- Google and Broadcom have provided multi‑billion‑dollar credit facilities tied to Anthropic’s chip usage, betting that a public flotation will allow the company to finance itself independently.
Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has said he expects Anthropic and OpenAI to evolve into cloud-service providers in their own right, and that IPOs will change their credit profiles.
Analysts’ views and remaining risks
A CreditSights analysis suggests Anthropic’s rapid revenue growth could justify an investment-grade rating if the company raises roughly $100 billion of fresh capital in its IPO and achieves a market valuation near $2 trillion (about $2,000 billion). OpenAI is expected to follow its rival to the market next year.
However, rating agencies remain cautious because both firms are loss-making, financial reporting is relatively opaque, and annualized revenue metrics can overstate real performance. Moreover, SpaceX’s bonds lost value quickly after issuance, a reminder that post-IPO performance can diverge from initial ratings.
Implications
If Anthropic and OpenAI secure investment-grade ratings, borrowing costs for major infrastructure projects would fall and access to conservative institutional capital would broaden. At the same time, the firms’ current financial positions and rating-agency prudence mean the outcome is far from guaranteed.
This article was prepared with the assistance of an AI tool; the final content was edited and verified by our reporter.
