Salesforce plans to allocate $300 million for Anthropic tokens this year, and Benioff is looking to integrate coding functionality within Slack next.

      **Summary:** Marc Benioff announced that Salesforce plans to spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens this year, primarily for coding. He made this prediction during the All-In podcast, praising both AI coding agents and Anthropic, stating that this investment will reduce construction costs at Salesforce. Tokens refer to the text units processed by large language models, and a $300 million token expenditure from Salesforce would position it as one of Anthropic's largest clients; however, this figure has not been officially confirmed. Anthropic's projected annual revenue has surged from around $9 billion in late 2025 to roughly $30 billion by March 2026, spurred by the adoption of its Claude model for various applications.

      Benioff highlighted the significant efficiency gains brought by AI agents at Salesforce, citing a reduction in their support staff from 9,000 to 5,000 thanks to agent-driven productivity. He mentioned that similar improvements are occurring in engineering, with faster product iterations and reduced development costs. Additionally, Salesforce is developing technology to simplify coding within Slack, which it acquired in 2021 for $27.7 billion. He teased upcoming features that will enhance coding capabilities within the platform, which boasts new AI functionalities powered by Claude.

      This year, Salesforce's Slack revenue is expected to reach $3 billion, while its Agentforce business has generated $800 million in annual recurring revenue, reflecting a significant year-over-year growth. Starting this summer, all new Salesforce customers will have AI-enabled Slack integrated from the onset.

      Benioff's token expenditure forecast comes with a noteworthy caveat. He argued that not every generated token should necessarily be processed by premium models like Claude; he proposed creating an "intermediary layer" that intelligently directs tasks based on complexity—routing complex tasks to Claude and simpler ones to more economical models. Although this idea isn't new, Benioff's endorsement carries weight given his position as CEO of a leading enterprise applications vendor.

      In the context of rising token consumption costs in the enterprise AI sector, Anthropic recently concluded a $1.5 billion joint venture aimed at leveraging Claude within the businesses of major private equity firms. As a result, Salesforce's anticipated $300 million expenditure reflects a broader trend where frontier AI spending is becoming a routine operational cost rather than merely an innovation budget concern.

      Salesforce has also invested over $300 million in Anthropic, securing about a 1% stake in the company, which is currently valued at $380 billion. Benioff previously stated that Microsoft prevented Salesforce from investing in OpenAI, steering it toward Anthropic instead. This investment has yielded over ten times the initial amount, and the question now is whether the $300 million in token spending will yield similar returns in engineering efficiency, which Benioff is betting on.