Salesforce and Anthropic have expanded upon their existing partnership to develop Claudeforce, the companies announced Aug. 26. The details came ahead of Salesforce’s quarterly earnings call.
The expansion formally launches with “Salesforce in Claude,” the latter of which is Anthropic’s platform. That plugin comes with 37 prebuilt sales skills, enabling sellers and artificial intelligence (AI) agents to act on live revenue context, automate updates “and take governed action right from Claude.”
The companies said they plan to introduce more integrations with Claude, Salesforce and Slack, “expanding each company’s use of the other’s technologies.”
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff claimed the companies are “bringing together the world’s No. 1 AI and No. 1 CRM” (customer relationship management platform).
Salesforce depicts the layers within its tech stack, including where Anthropic fits into its AI foundation. | Image credit: Salesforce press materials
Timing of Anthropic and Salesforce’s expanded partnership
The announcement comes as Claude has increasingly generated AI-referral traffic to online retailers’ websites.
Digital Commerce 360 and ReFiBuy’s AI Rankings found that in Q1 2026, just one of the Top 1000 online retailers received most of its AI traffic referrals from Claude. However, Claude made the biggest gains in that respect during Q2, according to Digital Commerce 360 and ReFiBuy data. Claude became the top AI referral source for 15 of the Top 1000 retailers in Q2.
Still, in both Q1 and Q2 2026, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has generated the largest source of AI-referral traffic to the Top 1000 online retailers in North America. 844 of those retailers’ AI traffic primarily came from ChatGPT in Q1, 16 from Google’s Gemini and eight from Perplexity.
Then, in Q2, Gemini was the leading source for 32 and Perplexity for 21. ChatGPT was the only one of the four to lose share of AI traffic referrals in Q2, the data showed. Its Q2 share fell to 722 retailers.
Digital Commerce 360 and ReFiBuy’s AI Rankings build on the former’s Top 1000 Database, a market research tool centered around online sales. The AI Rankings — which the companies update quarterly — indicate which retailers excel at four AI-related areas not strictly tied to ecommerce sales.
Salesforce and Anthropic integrations for Claudeforce
The companies said they have made “Salesforce in Claude” available to select pilot customers. They expect to launch in open beta in September 2026.
“Here, the UI is the AI — allowing you to build custom apps dynamically and answer any enterprise question,” Benioff said in the announcement. “Probabilistic intelligence alone doesn’t run a company, and deterministic systems don’t reason. By fusing Claude’s extraordinary reasoning with the trusted data, workflows, and governance every enterprise runs on, we’re delivering a dynamic interface that thinks, reasons, and acts.”
Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO, said the companies believe “frontier intelligence” should be safe, trustworthy and “deeply capable.”
“Salesforce in Claude brings this same frontier intelligence into the systems where much of the world’s commercial activity happens,” Amodei said. “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.”
The companies highlighted four points regarding their expanded partnership:
- The Claudeforce partnership launches with “Salesforce in Claude.”
- Claude is available in Salesforce’s Agentforce.
- The companies are embedding Claude directly into Salesforce’s Slack platform.
- Salesforce and Anthropic are “strategic customers of one another.”
Regarding the last point, they said the “reciprocal adoption makes each company both a builder and a customer of the hybrid architecture they are bringing to market together.”
Salesforce is Anthropic’s preferred CRM, according to the announcement. Meanwhile, Claude is the AI model powering Slackbot for Salesforce customers and employees. Additionally, Claude is also the default model for Salesforce offerings including:
- Slack AI
- Salesforce in Claude
- Headless 360
- Agentforce Coworker
- Claude Code across Salesforce’s engineering organization
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