12 comments

  • radlad 1 hour ago
  • cmiles8 14 minutes ago
    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.

  • isolay 1 minute ago
    I’ve already stashed the popcorn.
  • dofm 7 minutes ago
    That this is only "may not" is the shocker.
  • rvz 10 minutes ago
    Many companies IPO'd in the late 1990s and did not exist 10 years later.

    Let's say that the house of cards crashes down and takes the market with it who will shutdown, survive or have no choice but to get acquired for a 90% discount.

    Some will be just alive long enough for the early investors to pull out enough before the market crashes.

    • jonas21 1 minute ago
      And who will be the Amazon and grow 2500x over the next 30 years?

      I'm not saying that's going to happen -- but if you're going to use analogies from the dot-com era, you can't just cherry-pick the bad ones.

  • echelon 2 minutes ago
    Anthropic won't let people make video games. They are on the wrong side of history.

    They are so going to get disrupted. Chinese open weights models will have no such limitations, and there's no way we'll let Anthropic outlaw or ban them. (And even if they did, they can't police the whole world.)

    There is no moat. Anthropic should be playing nice, not trying to create a god while holding engineers under their thumb. We will route around it.

  • mosesman 1 hour ago
    https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/2d0b4d...

    9 shares left

    please comment if you have used it to ensure other people know if it could be read

    and its limited - only click if you are interested

    enjoy!

    • neutronicus 55 minutes ago
      > Wall Street banks earlier this week closed the North Star deal, which provides the financing for Anthropic to lease 1.5 gigawatts of Google’s semiconductors.

      This line is certainly eyebrow-raising to the educated layman.

      Apparently it means that anthropic is leasing a Google data center whose constituent servers draw 1.5 GW of power running representative workloads.

    • rubogubo 57 minutes ago
      [dead]
    • joe_the_user 28 minutes ago
      It's interesting you imagine nine shares would suffice for a large site like HN. No, the link doesn't work for me. Honestly, this kind of "sharing" seems a bit disingenuous at this point.
      • hoppp 26 minutes ago
        Yeah, 9 shares and then 10k people click
  • daviTeodoro 1 hour ago
    He is the article: Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

    Blackstone told investors Anthropic may not receive an investment-grade rating immediately after going public, a reversal from its previous guidance that would complicate the AI lab’s ability to finance its massive spending.

    The private capital giant told investors in Anthropic’s latest $63bn chip financing deal that the start-up is expected to receive a “high” junk rating from major credit rating agencies after its initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter.

    Blackstone is acting as an anchor investor on the deal, known as “Project North Star”, and is working with banks that stumped up financing on selling the debt on to other investors.

    Anthropic filed to go public on Monday, setting up what could be the largest listing of all time next month. The AI lab’s prospectus sketched out its “bold but sane” plans to spend more than $800bn on computing infrastructure between now and 2045.

    An investment-grade credit rating is central to those ambitions, enabling Anthropic to borrow at lower rates to finance its AI infrastructure projects. The group has cash and equivalents of more than $112bn, and investors anticipate it could raise about $100bn more in the IPO. Sign reading "Blackstone" outside the Blackstone headquarters in New York, with pedestrians and city lights reflected in the glass. Blackstone’s funds have invested in $9bn of the junior debt at a lucrative yield of more than 10% © Angus Mordant/Bloomberg

    While Blackstone had told its investment partners in recent months that it was expecting an investment-grade rating for Anthropic before year-end, it has recently signalled that a rating in the double B range or above is more likely given the guidance it has received from major credit agencies, the people said.

    Such a designation would limit the pool of capital that Anthropic could tap because many insurance and pension funds are restricted from taking large positions in junk-rated borrowers. As a result, the company might need to continue to rely on its suppliers with high credit ratings to support its debt-raising efforts.

    US tech stocks slid to session lows on Friday following the FT’s report on Anthropic’s rating, with the Nasdaq 100 down 3.7 per cent in afternoon trading. Markets were sharply lower prior to the report after earnings from Amazon and Intel worsened fears about the sustainability of the AI boom.

    “It’s all about access to credit, it really matters . . . if [Anthropic] isn’t investment grade, the cost of credit goes higher, that’s not good for anyone,” said a US tech-focused portfolio manager.

    “It’s a bloodbath out there,” they added, referring to the sell-off in stocks.

    Wall Street banks earlier this week closed the North Star deal, which provides the financing for Anthropic to lease 1.5 gigawatts of Google’s semiconductors. More than $42bn of the senior loans is guaranteed by Broadcom, which co-develops the chips and has an investment-grade rating, while $18bn of the junior debt is backed by the AI start-up’s lease payments.

    Institutional investors covet senior debt because it takes priority over junior loans in the case of a default. Broadcom’s high A-tier credit rating was an important factor in allowing Anthropic to secure the financing.

    Blackstone’s funds invested in $9bn of the junior debt at a lucrative yield of more than 10 per cent, the FT previously reported. Bankers for Anthropic and rival OpenAI have also lobbied the largest rating agencies to grant the AI labs investment-grade ratings after their IPOs.

    Project North Star’s $18bn junior debt, which exposes lenders more acutely to Anthropic’s credit risk, has been assigned a double B plus rating with positive outlook from Kroll Bond Rating Agency, a slight improvement from stable outlook in a similar deal known as Project “Big Sky” four months ago. It also received a double B rating from Morningstar DBRS, the people added.

    The big three credit agencies — Fitch, Moody’s and S&P — which have bigger influence on companies’ borrowing costs, have not officially issued any credit ratings for Anthropic.

    Anthropic, Blackstone, KBRA, Morningstar DBRS and S&P declined to comment. Fitch and Moody’s did not respond to requests for comment.

    • jacquesm 33 minutes ago
      "bold but sane" -> that sounds as if Claude wrote their prospectus?
  • mosesman 1 hour ago
    [flagged]
  • rzz3 1 hour ago
    [flagged]
    • youngtaff 1 hour ago
      What's wrong with paying for serious news?
      • furyofantares 1 hour ago
        The problem is sharing it to a group of people who mostly aren't paying for it. It's a good way to get a thread that's just people reacting to the title, which drives HN toward just being a discussion board instead of a place to find good content.
      • csdreamer7 8 minutes ago
        Most news articles are not worth paying for. From leaving out details to serving an agenda; a lot of news has lost it's credibility. WSJ is a good example. It had really great long articles backed by real research before it was bought by Murdock.
      • sreekanth67 57 minutes ago
        I would pay if its token based pay per read model. nobody want to subscribe to 10 news websites paying hundreds every month.
        • wslh 16 minutes ago
          This, don't get why there was no model like this. Even understanding the complexity to reach consensus (and technology).
      • radlad 1 hour ago
        Nothing wrong with paying for serious news, but when most viewers can't read the article it probably won't get much useful discussion.
      • isatty 49 minutes ago
        1. Can’t be bothered

        2. Never going to visit this site again and I am not going to make an account for it

        I am however, okay with turning off the ad blocking if they’re running reasonable ads (not every other paragraph).

      • eqvinox 54 minutes ago
        Agree with the 2 siblings: the problem is HN readers at large unable to read it, hence no useful discussion.

        I'd also add: from paid online news, I also expect a moderated forum/comment section, with a human to escalate to if automatic/AI moderation fails.

      • paxy 27 minutes ago
        Should everyone pay for every news source?
        • heromal 11 minutes ago
          Only the ones that ask for it, obviously. What kind of stupid question is this?
      • lurk2 25 minutes ago
        People who participate in forums share their insights for free and resent the friction that a paywall adds to information being diffused.
        • heromal 11 minutes ago
          Nah they're just cheap.
  • _HMCB_ 1 hour ago
    What could go wrong?