Salesforce Shares Soar as an Anthropic Mark-Up Pads Profit

Salesforce shares jumped as much as 23% on Thursday after a $2.53-per-share mark-up on Anthropic padded an 80% earnings beat. Revenue only matched Wall Street. GAAP operating income did not grow at all.

The company still posted real demand signals, including faster cash flow and a 14% rise in near-term contracted revenue. The number that launched the rally was not one of them.

The $5.90 Figure Was Mostly a Mark-Up

Salesforce reported fiscal second-quarter results on August 26 for the period ended July 31. Adjusted earnings were $5.90 a share, against an LSEG consensus of $3.27, the comparison CNBC used and the one that produced the 80.4% “beat.” CNBC also put revenue at $11.35 billion, versus $11.32 billion expected.

Almost all of that gap sat below operating income. The company’s own exhibit to the 8-K recorded gains on strategic investments of $2,613 million, up from $6 million a year earlier. Those gains added $2.53 to non-GAAP earnings per share and $2.43 to GAAP earnings per share, the filing said, using tax rates of 20.5% and 23.5%.

Strip out the mark-up and adjusted EPS was about $3.37, a dime above the $3.27 consensus and up from $2.91 a year earlier. That is a clean beat of roughly 3%, not 80%. The Motley Fool, reading the 10-Q filed the next day, said the Anthropic stake was worth about $5.1 billion at July 31 and accounted for $2.7 billion of the quarter’s unrealized gains. No other private holding, the paper said, made up even a tenth of the portfolio.

The same 10-Q math sits on the balance sheet. Strategic investments rose to $11.32 billion from $7.59 billion at January 31. Anthropic was about 22% of that book in January and about 45% by July, The Motley Fool reported, after Anthropic raised money in May at a $965 billion valuation, a figure CNBC also carried. Bloomberg had already pegged Salesforce’s stake at about $5 billion on June 1.

GAAP income from operations was $2.331 billion, against $2.332 billion a year earlier. Non-GAAP operating income rose 10% to $3.87 billion, and the non-GAAP operating margin slipped to 34.1% from 34.3%. Holger Mueller of Constellation Research told SiliconANGLE the earnings jump was “really only attributable to the company’s strategic investments.” The cash-flow statement backs him in one respect: the $2.6 billion was added back as an unrealized gain, so it did not create the cash.

Agentforce’s $1.5 Billion Includes Two New Lines

Chair and CEO Marc Benioff still had a product story to tell. Combined Agentforce and Data 360 annual recurring revenue reached nearly $3.9 billion, up more than 210% from a year earlier. On its own, Agentforce ARR exceeded $1.5 billion, up more than 240%. Effective this quarter, that Agentforce figure includes Slackbot and Headless 360, the company said in its second-quarter fiscal 2027 results release, so part of the leap is a wider definition.

AGENTFORCE IN THE QUARTER

• Agentforce ARR: More than $1.5 billion, up over 240%, and now counting Slackbot and Headless 360.
• Combined AI ARR: Agentforce plus Data 360 near $3.9 billion, up over 210% year over year.
• Work units: 3.2 billion Agentic Work Units in the quarter, up 97% from the prior quarter, and 7.0 billion to date.
• Slackbot: Users grew more than 150% quarter over quarter; on the earnings call Benioff said it reached 1 million active users five months after launch.

Bookings for Agentforce One Edition and Agentforce for Apps, the premium Sales and Service bundles, more than doubled quarter over quarter. Data 360 ingested 104 trillion records, up 355%, including 82 trillion through Zero Copy. Slack posted its fastest quarterly net-new annual order value growth since Salesforce bought it.

Days before the print, a TD Cowen survey found implementation partners still reporting no meaningful Agentforce revenue of their own. Headquarters metrics and channel cash have been out of sync before with Salesforce products, and they may be again. Valoir analyst Rebecca Wettemann told SiliconANGLE that Slack is becoming the place agents live, and that Salesforce now has “an Agentforce vs. Slack identity problem” if customers cannot tell which product they are buying.

Why the Stock Still Jumped 23 Percent

The stock ran because investors had spent a year pricing Salesforce as the first big casualty of cheap AI labor, and this print gave them three reasons to unwind that bet: contracted revenue accelerated, cash flow jumped, and Benioff used the call to bury the “SaaSpocalypse” line. Shares had already popped in Wednesday after-hours trade, then The Motley Fool clocked Thursday’s move at about 23% to around $252, calling it the company’s second-biggest trading day on record.

Current remaining performance obligation, the revenue signed and due in the next 12 months, was $33.5 billion, up 14% in constant currency. Total remaining performance obligation was $66.3 billion, up 11%. Free cash flow was $1.1 billion, up 81%, and operating cash flow was $1.3 billion, up 71%. Those cash figures do not include the Anthropic mark-up.

President and CFO Robin Washington said net-new annual order value growth was the strongest in four years, “keeping us on track for second-half organic revenue reacceleration.” On the call, Benioff said Agentforce, Sales, Service, and Slack seats all grew year over year, attrition was near its lowest level, and contract terms improved. He told CNBC’s Jim Cramer the SaaSpocalypse narrative had been “such nonsense.” He also said nine of the ten AI companies that standardized on Salesforce had lifted spend 435% year over year, and that “frontier models depend on CRM.”

Revenue still included $456 million from Informatica, and subscription and support included $440 million from that deal. Take Informatica out of the $11.35 billion and growth on the rest of the company lands closer to 6% against last year’s $10.24 billion. The AI products are compounding off a small base. They are not yet the $46 billion company.

Salesforce Is Putting the CRM Inside Claude

The same afternoon, Salesforce and Anthropic announced Claudeforce. The first product is Salesforce in Claude, a plugin with 37 prebuilt sales skills for meeting prep, deal health, and pipeline review, in open beta in September. Sellers will query and update live CRM records from Anthropic’s chat window. Benioff’s own line on the launch was that “the UI is the AI.”

WHAT CLAUDEFORCE SHIPS

• Salesforce in Claude: A plugin that routes actions back through Salesforce so existing permissions and business rules still bind, with more skills due later this year.
• Claude in Salesforce: Claude as a reasoning model for the Atlas engine, and as the default behind Agentforce Vibes and Agentforce Coworker, including through Amazon Bedrock inside Salesforce’s trust boundary.
• Claude in Slack: Claude as the default Slack model, powering Slackbot, Claude Tag for team decisions, and Slack Code.
• Reciprocal use: Salesforce is Anthropic’s preferred CRM and Slack workspace; Claude is Salesforce’s preferred assistant for its own developers and staff.

That is a distribution win for Anthropic and a hedge for Salesforce, and it is also an admission that a lot of the work may no longer happen on Salesforce screens. Patrick Moorhead, founder of Moor Insights & Strategy, wrote that the split is clean on paper: Salesforce keeps the data boundary, Anthropic supplies the model. The open question is whether customers still pay full CRM prices once the chat window does the clicking.

Salesforce in Claude brings this same frontier intelligence into the systems where much of the world’s commercial activity happens. Through this partnership, companies can point Claude at the customer information and business context that they’ve been building in Salesforce for decades, and use it to actually run and grow their businesses.

Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder, Anthropic, Claudeforce announcement

Benioff posted the launch clip himself, with the claim that Claude now runs natively on the CRM and can take governed action without leaving the chat.

Claudeforce is here. ⚡️ The #1 AI (Claude) now runs natively on the #1 CRM (Salesforce). Through the new AIforce harness + Headless 360, Claude gets direct, governed access to Data 360, Tableau, Slack, and your entire Salesforce workflow—without ever leaving the chat.
What this… pic.twitter.com/7RGXSChXON

— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) August 26, 2026

Replies to that clip spent as much energy on the soundtrack as on the product, and one gag about an 18-month Salesforce implementation still landed, because that is how a lot of customers remember these rollouts. The name Claudeforce did not help. The substance underneath the jokes is sharper: if the interface is the model, Salesforce has to collect on data, permissions, and actions, not on a home screen people stop opening.

Buybacks Cut the Share Count by 141 Million

Adjusted EPS got a second lift that had nothing to do with Agentforce. Diluted shares used in the non-GAAP calculation fell to 821 million from 962 million a year earlier, a 15% drop. The company is still working through a $25 billion accelerated share repurchase that initially delivered 103 million shares, with final settlement due in October. It also paid $364 million in dividends in the quarter.

The buyback is showing up as interest cost. Interest expense was $473 million, against $67 million a year earlier, after Salesforce issued debt to fund the ASR. On a GAAP basis, earnings per share without the investment gain were about $1.86, below last year’s $1.96. The per-share growth story is partly a smaller denominator.

In the quarter Salesforce also spent $958 million buying more strategic investments and took in $179 million from sales of that book. The Anthropic position is no longer a leftover seed check. It is approaching half the $11.3 billion portfolio, which means the next private round, or an IPO mark, will swing reported profit again, in either direction. Guidance explicitly assumes the portfolio does not move.

Only $100 Million of the Raise Is Organic

Full-year revenue guidance moved to $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion, up 11% to 12%, or 11% in constant currency. The net raise was $200 million, or $300 million in constant currency. Informatica is still baked in at slightly more than 3 points of that growth.

THE $200 MILLION RAISE

• Organic growth: $100 million tied to Agentforce, Data 360, and Slack.
• Pending deals: $200 million from Contentful and Fin, which Salesforce expects to close independently in the fiscal third quarter.
• Currency: a $100 million foreign-exchange headwind after the dollar strengthened in Q2.

Non-GAAP operating margin guidance stayed at 34.3%. Cash-flow growth guidance stayed at about 4% to 5%. Third-quarter revenue was set at $11.42 billion to $11.50 billion, and third-quarter adjusted EPS at $3.42 to $3.44, which sits next to the $3.37 the company earned this quarter once the mark-up is removed. Full-year adjusted EPS guidance is $16.67 to $16.71, a midpoint of $16.69 that the company said is 18.5% above the prior midpoint. That year already contains the $2.53 from Q2. Management said it cannot forecast future gains or losses and assumes none.

cRPO growth for the third quarter was guided at about 14%, and that figure excludes Contentful and Fin. Professional-services revenue is still the soft patch. The second-half “organic reacceleration” Washington described now has to show up in the numbers without another private-market gift.

Investor Day is set for September 16 at the St. Regis in San Francisco, beside Dreamforce. By then the Contentful and Fin closes should be dated, and Claudeforce should be in open beta. The print that sent the stock up 23% will still contain the same split: a software company growing in the low double digits, an AI product line compounding off a small base, and a $2.6 billion line that was never sold to a customer.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of Salesforce’s fiscal second-quarter results and related product announcements, and it is for information only. It is not investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell CRM or any other security, and it is not a prediction of future prices, earnings, or the value of Salesforce’s stake in Anthropic. Readers should consult a licensed financial adviser or other qualified investment professional who can consider their own objectives and risk tolerance before acting. Figures, guidance, and deal status reflect the company’s filings and public comments as of August 28, 2026, and may change with later filings, closes, or mark-to-market moves.