Salesforce staff are puzzled as to why the company is endorsing a rival within Slack.

      TL;DR Anthropic's Claude Tag operates as a competing AI teammate within Slack. Salesforce publicly promoted it, yet employees are concerned it rivals their own Slackbot and Agentforce.

      When Anthropic introduced Claude Tag on Tuesday, an advanced AI tool designed to function as a constant teammate within Slack channels, some Salesforce employees, which owns Slack, expressed confusion. Salesforce promoted Anthropic's product on social media, even though it directly competes with their own Slackbot and Agentforce platform, as reported by The Information.

      The underlying issue is structural. Salesforce acquired Slack for $27.7 billion in 2021 and has heavily invested in developing Slackbot into an advanced AI system. In March, Salesforce launched over 30 new AI features for Slackbot, such as meeting transcription, desktop activity monitoring, task completion via third-party tools, and basic CRM functionalities, all of which rely on Anthropic's Claude.

      Now, Claude Tag provides a similar experience within the same platform. Users can type @Claude in any channel to delegate tasks, which the AI organizes into stages and tackles in full view. An ambient mode actively joins discussions to highlight updates, bring in context from other channels, and follow up on overlooked conversations. It builds institutional knowledge over time instead of resetting with each interaction.

      This overlap creates a challenging positioning issue. Slack customers can now select between Slackbot, Agentforce agents, and Claude Tag within the same workspace. An independent Salesforce publication, Salesforce Ben, pointed out that this situation raises the issue of whether there is “too much choice” for enterprise clients aiming to consolidate on a single AI interface.

      Salesforce has fiscal motivations to promote Claude Tag, despite the competitive friction. The company anticipates spending $300 million on Anthropic tokens this year and holds about a 1% stake in Anthropic, currently valued at $380 billion. Benioff has described Slack as “the interface to AI” and has positioned the platform as model-agnostic, inviting third-party AI agents alongside Salesforce’s own. Anthropic represents the first LLM provider fully integrated within the Salesforce trust framework, ensuring that data remains within the ecosystem and is not used for model training.

      However, employee concerns reported by The Information indicate that the open-platform strategy causes internal confusion regarding where Salesforce’s algorithms end and its partners’ begin. Agentforce achieved $800 million in annual recurring revenue as of the latest earnings report, a 169% increase year-on-year with 29,000 deals closed. If Claude Tag captures the same enterprise functions that Agentforce is meant to address, the revenue outcomes could diverge for two companies that are otherwise closely linked.

      In the coming weeks, Anthropic plans to extend Claude Tag to Microsoft Teams, email, and other project management tools. This expansion would take the product beyond Slack, establishing it as a cross-platform AI agent that operates wherever knowledge workers interact. For Salesforce, this means that the partner they are paying $300 million annually is developing infrastructure to function outside of Slack entirely.