Salesforce and Anthropic expanded their strategic partnership on August 26, unveiling Claudeforce, a plugin that pushes live Salesforce CRM data and workflows directly into Anthropic's Claude chatbot1,5. The product ships with 37 pre-built sales skills covering meeting preparation, deal health reviews, and pipeline analysis, letting sellers query, update, and act on CRM records without opening Salesforce's own interface.
The announcement marks the first time Salesforce has appended its "force" suffix to another company's product name. Claudeforce is available to select pilot customers now, with an open beta planned for September and additional skills for service, marketing, and commerce functions beginning to launch in the third quarter.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei appeared together on CNBC on the same day3. "We're delivering a dynamic interface that thinks, reasons, and acts," Benioff said in a statement. In a separate CNBC interview, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei addressed concerns about AI displacing SaaS vendors: "We're not interested in destroying anyone".
The plugin, built for Anthropic's Claude CoWork environment, relies on Salesforce's Headless 360 infrastructure, a collection of APIs, MCP servers, and command-line tools released at Salesforce's TDX developer conference in March. An administrator connects the plugin once, with authentication and permissions managed centrally; when a seller issues a request, Claude reasons over available skills and executes against Salesforce's MCP server using the user's existing permissions. Salesforce charges for usage through its headless consumption pricing, while customers separately contract with Anthropic for Claude inference.
The partnership's origins were partly internal. Anthropic's own workforce used Salesforce "pretty much exclusively through Claude and a series of skills and MCP servers," and the two companies decided to productize that setup as a CoWork plugin.
Beyond the plugin, Claude is now the default model across Slack. Salesforce says 83% of its workforce uses Claude-powered Slackbot, claiming 3.8 million productivity hours saved annually. Claude also powers the Claude Tag feature Anthropic previewed in June and the new Slack Code product.
The Claudeforce announcement landed alongside Salesforce's fiscal second-quarter earnings for the period ending July 31. Revenue reached $11.35 billion, up 11% year over year6. Net income hit $3.53 billion, or $4.29 per share, an 87% jump from $1.89 billion a year earlier. The company reported a $2.6 billion gain on strategic investments, attributed to its stake in Anthropic. Bloomberg reported in June that Salesforce's investment in Anthropic was valued at roughly $5 billion. Anthropic separately told investors its annualized revenue run rate reached $65 billion at the end of July, sevenfold higher than a year ago.
Salesforce raised its full-year revenue guidance to $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion, up from the $45.9 billion to $46.2 billion range issued in May. Annualized revenue from Agentforce AI products topped $1.5 billion, up 240% year over year, accelerating from over 200% growth a quarter earlier. Salesforce also disclosed a $1.6 billion contract from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and plans to acquire customer service startup Fin for $3.6 billion, with the deal expected to close in the fiscal third quarter.
Shares rose 12% in extended trading. As of the close on August 26, Salesforce stock was down 22% year to date, against a 12% gain for the S&P 500.
Benioff pushed back on the narrative that AI models would cannibalize traditional software. "This is not the SaaSpocalypse," he said, adding that Salesforce had been hearing dire predictions for two quarters and that none had materialized. ANALYSIS The dual-billing structure, with Salesforce charging headless consumption fees and Anthropic charging separately for inference, positions Claudeforce as additive revenue for both companies rather than a zero-sum channel conflict.