Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the company expects to spend nearly $300 million on Anthropic tokens in 2026.
Speaking on the All-In podcast, Benioff said much of the spending would go towards coding-related work, while praising AI coding agents and Anthropic’s models for improving efficiency across Salesforce.
“These coding agents are awesome. Anthropic is awesome,” Benioff said.
Salesforce currently has around 15,000 engineers, many of whom now use AI tools such as Anthropic models, OpenAI Codex, and Cursor in their development workflows.
Benioff added that AI tools are helping Salesforce reduce development costs and accelerate product creation. The company is also working on new coding capabilities within Slack, the workplace collaboration platform Salesforce acquired in 2021.
“You’re going to see some cool stuff with Slack and code I’m not ready to talk about yet,” he said. “But there’s no question that we are in a new moment in coding.”
Benioff also said companies will increasingly need an “intermediary layer” capable of deciding which AI tasks should be routed to expensive frontier models such as Anthropic’s Claude and which can be handled using smaller, cheaper models.
Tokens are units of text processed by large language models, and AI companies generally charge enterprise customers based on the number of tokens consumed. Analysts say a $300 million annual spend would make Salesforce one of Anthropic’s largest commercial customers.
Benioff has previously linked AI adoption to workforce efficiency gains at Salesforce. Last year, he said AI agents helped the company reduce its support organisation from 9,000 employees to 5,000.
Despite the freeze on engineering hires, Salesforce continued expanding in other parts of the business, saying it planned to add between 1,000 and 2,000 salespeople to drive enterprise adoption of its AI products.
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