AI-Powered Bond Rating Startup Says Open AI Debt Is Junk, Anthropic Is Barely Investment Grade

OpenAI debt is junk. Anthropic gets a “triple B” rating.

At least that’s the opinion of AIR Platforms, which on October 1 published an unsolicited credit report on the two companies. AIR is a 10-person, AI-powered New York City startup that has raised $6.1 million. Its cofounders include CEO Glenn Carvajal, who spent 12 years at Moody’s. AIR gives Anthropic a BBB and OpenAI a BB+, putting the two companies on opposite sides of the investment-grade divide (BBB- is the cutoff).

The AI buildout is expected to require trillions of dollars of spending over the next few years, much of it before the revenue arrives to justify it. Railroads laid track before the passengers came. Telecom companies buried fiber before the traffic showed up. AI companies are making a similar bet, and that makes the cost and availability of capital especially important. Ratings determine not only how much a borrower pays, but who can buy the bonds and notes being issued. Many bond funds and pensions are constrained by mandates that require them to keep most of their fixed income assets in investment-grade securities. These companies will need billions in financing to justify the massive spending already underway. If that financing gets too expensive, or dries up, they may never reach the scale needed to make today’s spending pay off. And with more of the economy riding on AI, they’re hardly the only ones with something at stake.

AIR hasn’t seen either company’s complete financial statements, so a heap of salt is required. AIR starts with what’s public, uses AI to estimate the missing pieces and then runs its best estimate of the companies’ financials through its credit model. One piece of that estimate, shared with Forbes, puts Anthropic’s EBITDA margin at 5.4% and OpenAI’s at negative 33.3%. The median for AIR’s seven-company technology benchmark, which includes giants Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Palantir, Alphabet, Apple and Amazon, is 43.3%. All of these companies except Oracle get investment grade ratings according to AIR’s AI-enhanced analysis.

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