Salesforce Stock Jumps 12% on Anthropic Stake Gain

A Year-Long "SaaSpocalypse" Narrative

Going into the 26th, Salesforce shares were down 22% year to date. That follows a 20% drop in 2025, marking two straight years of declines — a stretch during which the Nasdaq climbed more than 35%, leaving Salesforce a notable laggard. Behind the slump was a fear that generative AI from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic would replace enterprise software outright, a scenario some have dubbed the "SaaSpocalypse." On the earnings call, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff pushed back directly, saying "this is not SaaS doom" and arguing that the pessimism of the past two quarters simply hasn't played out.

What the Numbers Show

According to Salesforce's earnings release, second-quarter revenue (for the period ending July 31) grew 11% year over year, while net income jumped 87% to $3.53 billion ($4.29 per share), up from $1.89 billion ($1.96 per share) a year earlier. Free cash flow rose 81% to $1.1 billion, well ahead of the consensus estimate of $643.2 million.

Metric	This quarter / guidance	Market expectation (LSEG, etc.)
Revenue growth	Up 11% YoY	-
Net income	$3.53 billion	-
Free cash flow	$1.10 billion (+81%)	$643.2 million
Q3 adjusted EPS	$3.42–$3.44	$3.38
Q3 revenue	$11.42–$11.50 billion	$11.41 billion
Full-year revenue guidance	$46.1–$46.4 billion	$46.11 billion (previously $45.9–$46.2 billion)

At the midpoint, the full-year guidance implies 11% growth — a step up from the previous guidance of $45.9 billion to $46.2 billion issued back in May.

Claudeforce Puts Sales Work Inside Claude

Claudeforce is a plugin bundling 37 pre-built sales skills, letting Claude users draft emails, update Salesforce records, and carry out related tasks without leaving the chatbot. The two companies said they plan to deepen integration further across Claude, Salesforce, and the messaging platform Slack going forward. Notably, this marks the first time Salesforce has attached its own "force" brand suffix to another company's product name.

Speaking with CNBC's Jim Cramer, Benioff called it "essentially unprecedented in the industry." The interview took place on the top floor of Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, alongside Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Claudeforce is currently available only to select pilot customers, with a preview launch set for next month and additional skills planned to roll out later this year.

Amodei said the companies have put "enormous effort" into permissions management, and that the two are building what he called "enterprise frontier safeguards" to keep Salesforce customer data private and prevent the model from acting outside its intended bounds. He also noted that Claudeforce is already being used internally within Anthropic's own sales organization to speed up its workflows.

A $2.6 Billion Markup Behind the Profit Surge

A large share of this quarter's profit jump didn't come from operations at all — it came from revaluing Salesforce's stake in Anthropic. Anthropic raised equity funding in May at a $965 billion valuation, and that jump in valuation showed up on Salesforce's books as a $2.6 billion gain. Alphabet and Microsoft have both disclosed similar gains from their own Anthropic investments in their recent earnings reports.

Anthropic's annualized revenue hit $65 billion at the end of July, up sharply from $47 billion in May and $9 billion at the end of 2025. That kind of revenue growth is exactly what's been driving up the value of the stake Salesforce holds.

Other Growth Metrics Salesforce Highlighted

During the second quarter, Salesforce disclosed a $1.6 billion procurement contract with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and announced plans to acquire customer service startup Fin for $3.6 billion. That acquisition is now expected to close in the third quarter, ahead of its original schedule.

Annualized revenue for the company's AI agent product line, Agentforce, topped $1.5 billion, up 240% year over year — an acceleration from the roughly 200% growth pace seen the prior quarter. Still, Chief Operating and Financial Officer Robin Washington flagged "headwinds and volatility" in license sales for integration and analytics software during the earnings call. Current remaining performance obligations (cRPO), which represent revenue expected to be recognized over the next 12 months, came in at $33.5 billion, ahead of the analyst estimate of $33.22 billion.

Editor's Take

The real story in these numbers is that Salesforce has turned AI from a threat into a line item on its balance sheet. The headline 87% jump in net income looks impressive, but $2.6 billion of it came from a stock revaluation, not from running the business. In other words, Salesforce made money as an Anthropic shareholder while simultaneously becoming Anthropic's distribution partner through Claudeforce. One company is now playing investor, customer, and distributor all at once for an AI startup — a setup that looks a lot like what Microsoft has been doing with OpenAI, just with Salesforce and Anthropic in the roles this time.

In the past, Salesforce reserved its "force" suffix strictly for its own products. Attaching it to someone else's product for the first time signals that Claude is no longer treated as a separate tool sitting outside the Salesforce ecosystem — it's being treated as the interface itself. For an enterprise software company, that's less a concession than a calculated bet: if customers are going to do their work inside Claude regardless, better to bring your own data into that environment than to be left out of it.

For companies watching this from Korea, there are two threads worth separating. One is the growing trend of major SaaS vendors binding themselves tightly to a specific AI model, as Claudeforce illustrates. The other is that these SaaS vendors' earnings are increasingly tied to the equity value of the AI startups they've invested in. Claudeforce is still in preview with pilot customers only, so there's no basis yet for gauging when it might reach Korea — but with Anthropic reportedly preparing a Seoul office and naming a country lead, it's reasonable to expect similar integrations could eventually extend to Korean customers as well.

Over the coming weeks, Claudeforce's preview rollout should bring the first real feedback from pilot customers, and how tightly permissions and data isolation actually hold up will be the next thing to watch. At the same time, Salesforce's next earnings report will reveal whether gains from its Anthropic stake keep boosting net income going forward, or whether this quarter turns out to have been a one-off.

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