Salesforce Beats on AI While Anthropic Stake and Claudeforce Rewrite the Script

Salesforce reported second-quarter revenue of $11.35 billion and adjusted earnings of $5.90 a share, then raised its full-year outlook, as Agentforce and Data 360 annual recurring revenue neared $3.9 billion. Shares jumped as much as 13% after hours.

The beat also included a $2.6 billion gain on the company’s stake in Anthropic, and the same day Salesforce and Anthropic launched Claudeforce, placing Salesforce data, workflows and actions inside Claude.

The Numbers That Cleared the Bar

Fiscal second quarter ended July 31, 2026. Revenue rose 11% year over year to $11.35 billion, including a $456 million contribution from Informatica, acquired in November 2025. Subscription and support revenue hit $10.8 billion, up 12%.

GAAP diluted earnings reached $4.29 a share, up 119% from $1.96 a year earlier. Non-GAAP diluted earnings were $5.90 a share, more than double the prior-year figure and well above the $3.27 FactSet consensus. Operating cash flow climbed 71% to $1.3 billion; free cash flow rose 81% to $1.1 billion.

Current remaining performance obligation stood at $33.5 billion, up 14% in constant currency. Total RPO reached $66.3 billion, up 11%. GAAP operating margin was 20.5%; non-GAAP hit 34.1%.

Stripping the investment gain, adjusted EPS would have been closer to $3.37, still a modest beat. The paper profit from Anthropic accounted for the bulk of the net-income jump to $3.53 billion from $1.89 billion.

The revenue print cleared the FactSet mark by a slim $20 million. That narrow top-line margin made the quality of the mix matter more to investors than the headline alone. Subscription and support, at $10.8 billion, carried nearly all of the growth. Cash generation outpaced revenue growth by a wide gap, with free cash flow up 81% against an 11% sales rise.

Margin expansion on a non-GAAP basis to 34.1% kept the operating story intact even after the Informatica contribution entered the base. The gap between GAAP operating margin at 20.5% and the non-GAAP figure underscored how adjustments still shape the earnings narrative investors reward.

How the Anthropic Stake Moved the P&L

Salesforce has held a stake in Anthropic since the AI lab’s Series C in 2023 and continued investing through later rounds. In May 2026 Anthropic raised capital that valued the company at $965 billion. That revaluation produced the $2.6 billion strategic-investment gain booked in the quarter.

Alphabet and Microsoft have also recorded gains on their Anthropic positions in recent periods. For Salesforce the gain lifted headline earnings far above operating results and helped fuel the after-hours rally that added roughly $23 billion in market value.

Investors had watched the stock fall 22% year to date through the close. The after-hours move to about $232 reversed a large chunk of that decline in one session.

Without the $2.6 billion mark-to-market item, the earnings surprise shrinks from a double of the prior-year non-GAAP figure to a slim edge over the $3.27 consensus. The stock reaction still treated the operating beat, the ARR trajectory, and the raised guide as the durable story. The gain simply amplified the print enough to force a fast reassessment of a name that had lagged for most of the year.

The same stake that produced the paper profit is the commercial bridge to Claudeforce. That overlap means the P&L event and the product announcement are two faces of one relationship rather than separate catalysts.

Agentforce ARR Crosses $1.5 Billion

Agentforce annual recurring revenue exceeded $1.5 billion, up more than 240% year over year. Combined with Data 360 the AI and data products reached nearly $3.9 billion ARR, more than tripling. Benioff said the figure is about to cross $4 billion.

• 7.0 billion Agentic Work Units delivered to date, 3.2 billion of them in Q2 alone, up 97% quarter over quarter.
• 104 trillion records ingested by Data 360 in the quarter, up 355% year over year, including 82 trillion via Zero Copy.
• Bookings for Agentforce One Edition and Agentforce for Apps more than doubled quarter over quarter.
• Slack posted its fastest net-new annual order value growth since the acquisition; Slackbot users rose over 150% quarter over quarter.

Net new annual order value growth hit its strongest level in four years, according to President and CFO Robin Washington. That keeps the company on track for organic revenue reacceleration in the second half of the calendar year.

AI is delivering value across every layer of our platform. We’re seeing incredible demand for our AI and data products, with ARR about to cross $4 billion.

Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce earnings release

The usage metrics show adoption moving from pilots into volume. More than half of all Agentic Work Units delivered to date landed in a single quarter, and the 97% sequential jump in those units points to acceleration rather than a one-time catch-up. Data 360’s 355% rise in records ingested, with 82 trillion of the 104 trillion arriving through Zero Copy, suggests customers are connecting existing estates instead of only loading new copies.

Slack’s fastest net-new annual order value growth since the deal closed ties the AI story back to a product line that had been viewed as mature. Slackbot’s more than 150% sequential user increase gives that order growth a visible usage companion. Together with Agentforce bookings that more than doubled quarter over quarter, the stack now supplies the organic case Washington needs for the second-half reacceleration call.

Claudeforce Puts the CRM Inside Claude

The same day as earnings, Salesforce and Anthropic announced the Claudeforce expanded partnership details. The first product is Salesforce in Claude, a plugin shipping with 37 prebuilt sales skills for meeting prep, deal health reviews, pipeline updates and governed actions.

Sellers can reason over live revenue data and take action without opening the Salesforce interface. Actions still route through Salesforce so existing business rules and permissions stay enforced. An admin connects once; the whole team gets access.

Claude is now the default model across Slack, powering Slackbot, Claude Tag and Slack Code. Claude also runs inside Agentforce as a reasoning engine and is available via Amazon Bedrock inside the Salesforce Trust Boundary for regulated customers.

The companies call the underlying layer AIforce, Salesforce’s enterprise harness that exposes data, workflows, business logic, actions and governance to any agent through MCP servers, APIs and CLI tools. Benioff framed it as “the UI is the AI.”

Salesforce in Claude is in pilot now with open beta planned for September 2026. More skills for other functions arrive later in the year. Full Salesforce in Claude plugin skills and integration roadmap sit on the product page.

On CNBC with Jim Cramer, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei addressed the “SaaSpocalypse” worry directly: “We’re not interested in destroying anyone.” He added that Anthropic is a big user of Salesforce. The joint appearance underscored how tightly the two companies now present themselves.

The 37 prebuilt sales skills define the first beachhead: meeting prep, deal health, pipeline updates and governed actions. Governance stays with Salesforce even when the chat surface is Claude. That design tries to answer the concern that models would strip enterprise vendors down to raw data pipes. Regulated customers get a second path through Amazon Bedrock inside the Trust Boundary, so the same reasoning engine can run in environments that cannot call a public endpoint.

AIforce is the common substrate. By exposing data, workflows, business logic, actions and governance through MCP servers, APIs and CLI tools, Salesforce positions itself as the control plane any agent can call. Claude as default across Slack and as a reasoning engine inside Agentforce means the model is already embedded in products customers use daily, not only in a new plugin.

Guidance Climbs With Acquisitions in View

Salesforce raised full-year FY27 revenue guidance to $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion, up 11% to 12% year over year. That is a $200 million raise ($300 million in constant currency) from the prior $45.9 billion to $46.2 billion range. The lift includes $100 million of organic growth, $200 million from the pending Contentful and Fin acquisitions expected to close in the coming weeks of Q3, and a $100 million foreign-exchange headwind.

Full-year non-GAAP EPS guidance moved to $16.67 to $16.71 from the previous $14.06 to $14.12. Non-GAAP operating margin guidance stays at approximately 34.3%. Q3 revenue is guided at $11.42 billion to $11.50 billion, ahead of consensus, with non-GAAP EPS of $3.42 to $3.44.

The raised full-year FY27 revenue guidance and related tables appear in the official release. Final settlement of the $25 billion accelerated share repurchase is expected in October 2026; the company returned $364 million in dividends in the quarter.

Acquisitions supply twice the organic dollar lift in the revised range, yet the $100 million organic piece is the signal Washington’s reacceleration comment needs. Holding non-GAAP operating margin guidance at about 34.3% while folding in Contentful and Fin implies the company expects the new properties to come in near the existing margin profile. Q3 revenue guidance already sits ahead of consensus before those deals fully annualize, which sets a higher bar for the first print that will include them.

Cash Flow Strength Funds the Capital Return Path

Operating cash flow of $1.3 billion and free cash flow of $1.1 billion gave management room to keep returning capital while still investing in AI distribution. The 71% and 81% year-over-year jumps far outstripped the 11% revenue increase, a pattern that usually eases investor concern when subscription growth holds in the low double digits.

The $364 million in dividends paid during the quarter and the $25 billion accelerated share repurchase due to settle in October 2026 form the return side of that cash story. Settlement timing places the buyback’s final accounting just after the open beta window for Salesforce in Claude and after Investor Day.

• Operating cash flow: $1.3 billion, up 71% year over year
• Free cash flow: $1.1 billion, up 81% year over year
• Dividends returned in the quarter: $364 million
• Accelerated share repurchase: $25 billion, final settlement expected October 2026

Strong cash conversion also buffers the Informatica integration and the pending Contentful and Fin closes. When deal contributions and organic AI growth must share the same guide, the cash flow line becomes the practical proof that the model still funds both expansion and shareholder returns.

The Near-Term Calendar Tightens the Test

Several dated checkpoints now sit between the after-hours rally and the next full earnings verdict. Each one can either extend the AI narrative or put weight back on the organic growth question Washington flagged.

1. September 1, 2026: Product adoption webinar
2. September 16, 2026: Investor Day in San Francisco alongside Dreamforce
3. September 2026: Open beta for Salesforce in Claude
4. Coming weeks of Q3: Expected close of Contentful and Fin
5. October 2026: Final settlement of the $25 billion accelerated share repurchase
6. Q3 results: First full test of guidance and early Claudeforce read-through

Investor Day and Dreamforce give Benioff a stage to show whether the path from roughly $3.9 billion in Agentforce and Data 360 ARR toward $4 billion is visible in customer deployments. The open beta that follows will show whether sellers adopt Claude as a front door for Salesforce data and actions. Contentful and Fin then add their contribution to the revenue base that Q3 must defend.

The calendar compresses product proof, deal closing, and capital-return settlement into roughly two months. That density raises the cost of any miss on adoption or on the organic piece of the guide, because the same window is meant to confirm the story that lifted the stock after hours.

What the After-Hours Jump Leaves Unresolved

The 12% to 13% after-hours surge was the largest post-earnings move for the stock since August 2024. It reflected both the AI product traction and relief that growth metrics and guidance cleared the bar after a difficult year for software multiples.

Yet the biggest single contributor to the earnings print was the one-time investment gain. Core subscription growth remains in the low double digits even with Informatica. License revenue for integration and analytics showed headwinds and volatility, Washington said on the call.

Claudeforce answers the fear that large language models will turn enterprise software into mere APIs by making Salesforce the governed data and action layer underneath Claude. It also places the CRM’s future interface partly outside Salesforce’s own screens. That dual move is the irony at the center of the quarter: the same relationship that produced a multi-billion-dollar gain is the one embedding Salesforce inside the AI system some investors once viewed as an existential threat.

Investor Day is set for September 16 in San Francisco alongside Dreamforce. A product adoption webinar runs September 1. The next test arrives with Q3 results and the open beta of Salesforce in Claude.

The second-quarter fiscal 2027 results and simultaneous partnership announcement give Salesforce fresh numbers and a clearer AI narrative. Whether the organic reacceleration materializes and whether customers prefer Claude as the front door will decide how long the after-hours relief lasts.