Salesforce and Anthropic launch Claudeforce AI sales plugin

Salesforce and Anthropic launch Claudeforce AI sales plugin

Thu, August 27, 2026 at 3:06 PM GMT+3 3 min read

• CRM -0.03%

Salesforce and Anthropic announced Claudeforce on Wednesday, an expanded strategic partnership that embeds Salesforce's customer data, workflows, and business logic into Anthropic's Claude chatbot through a new plugin aimed at sales teams.

The plugin launches with 37 prebuilt sales skills — built jointly by the two companies — covering tasks such as meeting preparation, deal health review, and pipeline management, the companies said. Sellers can automate pipeline updates and take governed actions without leaving Claude. Salesforce in Claude is currently available to a select group of pilot customers, with an open beta expected in September 2026. Additional prebuilt skills are planned for later this year.

"We're bringing together the world's #1 AI and #1 CRM — the best of both worlds," Salesforce Chair and CEO Marc Benioff said in a statement. "This is how every business will run."

Anthropic CEO and Co-Founder Dario Amodei said in a statement that the partnership allows companies to "point Claude at the customer information and business context that they've been building in Salesforce for decades, and use it to actually run and grow their businesses."

The integration is powered by AIforce, Salesforce's enterprise framework that connects business data and workflows to AI agents through MCP servers, APIs, and command-line tools, the company said. An administrator connects the plugin once, with authentication and permissions applied across a team from day one, eliminating per-user setup.

The partnership extends beyond the plugin. Claude is now the default model for Slack, powering Slackbot and a new feature called Claude Tag for team decision-making, the companies said. Claude is also available inside Agentforce — Salesforce's AI agent platform — through Amazon Bedrock, keeping customer data within Salesforce's security boundary. The two companies said they are also strategic customers of each other: Salesforce uses Claude across its engineering organization, while Anthropic uses Salesforce as its preferred CRM and Slack as its preferred internal collaboration platform.

Salesforce stock climbed 12% in after-hours trading Wednesday, as the partnership announcement landed on the same day the company released its fiscal second-quarter earnings results. Salesforce posted revenue of $11.35 billion for the quarter, up 11% year over year, and raised its full-year revenue guidance by $200 million. Combined ARR from Agentforce and Data Cloud AI products climbed to nearly $3.9 billion, reflecting growth of more than 210% versus the prior year.

Marc Benioff had previously signaled the depth of Salesforce's reliance on Anthropic. Benioff said Salesforce was on track to spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens in 2026, with software coding as the primary use case. Salesforce also holds an equity stake in Anthropic, and the company's second-quarter net income included a $2.6 billion investment gain tied in part to that position.

Amodei told CNBC that permission management was a major focus for Anthropic in developing Claudeforce, and that the two companies have jointly developed what they call Enterprise Frontier Safeguards — a set of protections designed to preserve the privacy of Salesforce customer data and constrain AI behavior within defined boundaries.