Salesforce plans $300 million Anthropic spend as Benioff bets big on AI coding agents

Salesforce expects to spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens this year, and Benioff wants coding inside Slack next

Benioff says Salesforce will spend $300M on Anthropic tokens in 2026, calls for a routing layer between frontier and smaller models. Marc Benioff expects Salesforce to spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens this year, almost entirely on coding. The Salesforce CEO made the projection on the All-In podcast published on Friday, calling AI coding agents "awesome" and Anthropic "awesome" in the same breath, before adding that the spending would make everything at Salesforce cheaper to build. Tokens are the units of text that large language models process when generating output, and AI companies bill enterprise customers based on the volume consumed. A $300 million annual token bill from a single customer would make Salesforce one of Anthropic's largest commercial accounts, though neither company has confirmed the figure in official disclosures. Anthropic's annualised revenue run rate has grown from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025 to approximately $30 billion by the end of March 2026, driven by enterprise adoption of Claude for coding, legal, financial services, and general-purpose reasoning. Benioff said AI agents have delivered "unprecedented" efficiency gains at Salesforce across service, support, distribution, and marketing. Last August, he announced that agent-driven productivity had enabled the company to reduce its support workforce from 9,000 to 5,000. The coding use case, he suggested, is now producing a similar effect on the engineering side: faster product iteration, lower development costs, and a pace of output that was previously impossible. The CEO also revealed that Salesforce is working on technology to make coding easier inside Slack, the workplace communications platform Salesforce acquired for $27.7 billion in 2021. "You're going to see some cool stuff with Slack and code I'm not ready to talk about yet," he said. "But there's no question that we are in a new moment in coding." Salesforce overhauled Slack in March, unveiling more than 30 new AI capabilities for Slackbot that transform it from a conversational assistant into an agentic system capable of transcribing meetings, monitoring desktop activity, executing tasks through third-party tools via the Model Context Protocol, and functioning as a lightweight CRM. All of the new capabilities run on Anthropic's Claude. Benioff has described Slack as "the interface to AI" and noted that AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic run their own operations on the platform. Slack revenue is expected to hit $3 billion this year, and Salesforce's Agentforce business, its dedicated AI agent product line, reached $800 million in annual recurring revenue as of the most recent earnings, up 169% year-on-year with 29,000 deals closed. From this summer, every new Salesforce customer will have Slack automatically provisioned and AI-enabled from day one. Benioff's token projection comes with a caveat that is more interesting than the headline number. He told the podcast that not every token a company employee generates needs to go to a frontier model like Anthropic's Claude. He called for an "intermediary layer" that could route inputs intelligently, sending complex reasoning tasks to Claude and simpler ones to smaller, cheaper models. The idea is not new, but its endorsement by the CEO of the world's largest enterprise applications vendor is significant. Claude Opus 4.7, released this month, is priced at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. Smaller models from Anthropic's own Haiku line, or from open-weight competitors like Meta's Llama and DeepSeek, cost a fraction of that. At $300 million in annual spend, even modest routing optimisation could save Salesforce tens of millions of dollars, and Benioff appears to be signalling that Salesforce will build that optimisation rather than wait for Anthropic to offer it. The broader context is an enterprise AI market in which token consumption is becoming a major operational expense. Anthropic recently finalised a $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs to embed Claude inside the portfolio companies of the world's largest private equity firms, a distribution mechanism designed to turn token revenue from a series of individual enterprise contracts into a structural feature of how large organisations operate. Salesforce's projected $300 million spend is one data point in a pattern: frontier AI is no longer a line item in an innovation budget. It is becoming a cost of doing business at scale. Salesforce has also invested more than $300 million in Anthropic as a company, beginning with its Series C round in early 2023, giving it roughly a 1% stake in a company now valued at $380 billion. Benioff has said Microsoft blocked Salesforce from investing in OpenAI, which redirected the company toward Anthropic. That investment has produced a paper return of more than ten times the original outlay. Whether the $300 million in tokens produces a comparable return in engineering productivity is the question Benioff is betting on.

Salesforce Marc Benioff Spending Millions on Anthropic Tokens Instead of Hiring New Employees

The era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has changed everything. It has changed how small businesses work and improve efficiency, and it has also changed how big global companies like Salesforce operate. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff stopped hiring new software engineers in 2025. Benioff wanted to use AI as the efficiency gains are a lot better than hiring new employees for the same amount of money. According to Marc Benioff, Salesforce estimates that it would spend close to $300 million on Anthropic Tokes (for Claude Code, and more) in 2026. Speaking on the All-in podcast, Benioff said that productivity gains from AI, including coding agents and AI models are changing how engineers work rather than eliminating them.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Goes All-In on 'Awesome' Anthropic With $300 Million Spend, Hails Coding Agen

Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM) CEO Marc Benioff disclosed plans to spend roughly $300 million on Anthropic's AI this year, primarily for coding, calling the AI startup "a rocket ship that will not stop." Benioff Backs Anthropic Speaking on the All-In Podcast, Benioff said coding agents have unlocked capabilities that were previously out of reach, including faster software deployment, AI-driven outbound prospecting and the ability to implement and sell products at the same time. "I can do things that I just could not do before. I can go faster than ever before. I can implement my software and sell it at the same time. I've never been able to do that before." Benioff was clear in his praise, saying, "These coding agents are awesome. Anthropic is awesome." From SaaSpocalypse To $300M Opportunity Salesforce has also launched Headless 360, an API-first platform with 60+ MCP tools designed to give AI agents, including Claude Code, direct access to its enterprise stack. "I am going to probably use $300 million of Anthropic this year at Salesforce coding," Benioff said. Anthropic is expected to go public later this year. What's Going On With CRM Stock? Salesforce has a market capitalization of $141.94 billion, a 52-week high of $292.17 and a 52-week low of $163.52. The large-cap stock of the technology company has dropped 40.41% over the past 12 months. Benzinga's Edge Stock Rankings indicate that CRM stock is experiencing a negative price trend across all time frames. Photo Courtesy: Shutterstock Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.