Salesforce and Anthropic partner to launch 'Claudeforce' AI sales plugin

Salesforce and Anthropic on Wednesday expanded their strategic partnership and unveiled "Claudeforce," a new way for salespeople to access critical data directly from inside Anthropic's Claude chatbot.

Claudeforce is launching as a plugin with 37 pre-built sales skills that will allow Claude users to compose emails, update records and take other relevant actions, according to a release. The companies said they plan to introduce more integrations across Claude, Salesforce and its messaging platform Slack in the future.

"It's really a first in the industry," Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told CNBC's Jim Cramer on Wednesday. He was joined by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in a joint interview at the top of Salesforce Tower in San Francisco. "It's completely exciting. I think that this is the way all enterprise systems are going to run in the future."

Wednesday's announcement marks the first time that Salesforce has ever added its "force" suffix to the end of another company's product name.

Salesforce and its software peers have been under pressure as investors question whether AI tools from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI will replace them. Salesforce shares are down about 22% this year after dropping 20% in 2025. The Nasdaq, meanwhile, is up about 35% since the end of 2024.

Shares of Salesforce rose 12% in extended trading on Wednesday, after the company announced the partnership and reported fiscal second quarter results that beat Wall Street's expectations.

Anthropic primarily sells its Claude models and products to other businesses and has experienced a period of explosive growth this year. The company recently told investors that its annualized revenue run rate hit $65 billion at the end of July, a sevenfold increase from a year ago.

Amodei told CNBC on Wednesday that Anthropic put a "huge amount of effort" into managing permissions for Claudeforce. He said the two companies are building "Enterprise Frontier Safeguards" to ensure that Salesforce's customer data remains private, and that Anthropic's models "don't run out of control."

Amodei added that Claudeforce has already been useful for many of Anthropic's own employees.

"Within Anthropic, for a long time we've been accelerating the research teams within Claude, but this is the first time that we've really been able to incredibly accelerate our go-to-market efforts within Claude," he said.

Claudeforce is available to a select group of pilot customers, and it will launch in a preview capacity next month, the companies said. Additional pre-built skills will be available later this year.