Blackstone warns Anthropic may miss investment-grade rating after IPO
Anthropic may not secure investment-grade rating after IPO, Blackstone says
Blackstone has told investors that Anthropic could fail to earn an investment-grade credit rating once it goes public, a caution that casts doubt on how smoothly the AI company's landmark IPO will be received by debt markets. The warning centers on the credit quality investors can expect from one of the most closely watched listings in tech.
Anthropic may not secure investment-grade rating after IPO, Blackstone tells investors.
- radlad
https://wallhop.io/https://www.ft.com/content/59383c7f-8d82-...
- deepwoods
ChatGPT became publicly available in November 2022, and Claude followed in March 2023. It's year 4. It's foolish to think we know who the big names will be 20 years down the line, which is the kind of timeline bond investors are thinking about. A lot of people probably wish they could have invested (or invested more) in Google or Facebook in 2006, but they are probably very glad they did not invest in Yahoo or MySpace (or Friendster or Tumblr .. you get the idea) at the time, despite looking very promising (MySpace was beating Google on pageviews on some days in '06 and '07). Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok and WeChat didn't even exist yet.
- cmiles8
Is this a surprise?
By any sane normal sense of business and financials these AI labs look terrible on paper.
Any loan would be speculative at best, and the rating would simply reflect that.
Investing in these companies is like going wild at the casino. Sure you might make a fortune but strong odds are you’re gonna lose your shirt.
- 0x4e
By reading the comments I wonder if perhaps OAI & ANT are not going to be “model” companies and they are going to be the ones innovating in many fronts and cashing in for the benefits of those advancements…
What I’m trying to say here is, what if, they are staying closed strategically so they keep their most advanced models close to their chest until they make an incredible discovery. Say they cure cancer. In this case, they are taking that IP collaborating with big pharma and cashing in on the upside of such discovery.
So, what if on top of being just another enterprise and consumer product that accelerates the way we all work and live, it also becomes this factory of breakthroughs and that’s where open source models can’t compete with them.
Just speculating…
- hinkley
An IPO is where the investors cash out to spend money on something else. It’s where the founders and early employees get rich enough to start chasing other interests, or just retire outright.
- dia80
Anthropic's S-1 (IPO doc) says they will spend >$0.5T. Where is that money going to come from? The gap between the frontier and the open models isn't large enough to generate anything like that in operating profits. Debt markets are getting tapped out with AI debt. We are about to find out how much stomach equity investors have remaining. The fact that they might have trouble servicing their current and expected future debt comes as no surprise.
- tschellenbach
That makes sense, anthropic is in a rapidly changing market. Revenue could crater if a better model is released by a competitor. AI demand could fall behind. Doesn't seem like that will happen, but its definitely not investment-grade debt worthy either.
- tptacek
How unusual is this? Amazon spent over a decade with junk ratings.