Comment by AnodicElegy
3 days ago
First SpaceX, now Anthropic. I wonder what happened the last time the big rating agencies gave massive amounts of sketchy debt investment-grade ratings to avoid alienating their customers?
3 days ago
First SpaceX, now Anthropic. I wonder what happened the last time the big rating agencies gave massive amounts of sketchy debt investment-grade ratings to avoid alienating their customers?
From 2007-2008? Taxpayers bailed out the perps so that they could keep their bonuses.
Generally didn't happen, despite the common perception. The bailouts saved the banks, they generally did not care to save the owners or executives of the banks.
AIG famously continued to pay out huge bonuses the year after they were bailed out.
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Junk ratings are not investment grade. They’re rating this debt as at least a little bit sketchy.
From the article:
"The rating action, which has not previously been reported, shows Anthropic is close to achieving the investment-grade status that would allow the start-up to lower its borrowing costs and tap a wider pool of institutional investors including life insurance companies and pension funds.
Bankers for Anthropic and rival OpenAI have lobbied the largest rating agencies to grant the AI labs investment-grade ratings once they go public."
The fact that the only rating published is ‘junk’, and that it was from a small agency tells us quite a lot. Given the fact that Anthropic (or its representatives) likely ‘shopped’ for a rating means that this was the best anyone was willing to give them, and that the larger agencies probably refused to rate them without more information. I would have been surprised if the bankers hadn’t lobbied for the highest rating possible, as higher ratings increase their profits from the IPO.
1 reply →
Anthropic is planning an IPO and this is information investors would like to have.
I think the difference is everyone knows Anthropic is a high risk/high reward business that is only a few years old.
It is not like Anthropic was once this stable investment grade company that is now shopping around because the debt is being downgraded.
The headline is just click bait.
It's not a big ratings agency, and it's not investment grade.
The point of the headline isn’t to communicate that their debt is currently rated junk, it’s to communicate that it’s impossible for their rating to improve any further without becoming investment grade.
From the article:
"The rating action, which has not previously been reported, shows Anthropic is close to achieving the investment-grade status that would allow the start-up to lower its borrowing costs and tap a wider pool of institutional investors including life insurance companies and pension funds.
Bankers for Anthropic and rival OpenAI have lobbied the largest rating agencies to grant the AI labs investment-grade ratings once they go public."
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> I asked Gemma E4b and it was able to correct this comment's mistakes.
Okay thanks
Just to let you know what level we're operating at here in the comment section.
Crazy to come back and go "well i asked the lying machine and it actually said these things are wrong"
I think it's more "I know this is wrong myself, but also even the LLM can find the problems with it, that's how wrong it is"
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