Salesforce Profit Jump Rests on Anthropic and Two Deals

Salesforce posted $11.3 billion in second-quarter revenue, up 11%, and lifted its full-year sales forecast after the period ended July 31, 2026. Demand for Agentforce and Data 360 helped, and so did a deeper tie-up with Anthropic branded Claudeforce.

The profit print is a different machine. Net income reached $3.53 billion, or $4.29 a share, while operating income sat at $2.33 billion, unchanged from a year earlier. A $2.61 billion net gain on strategic investments, largely the company’s Anthropic stake, did the heavy lifting. Shares jumped 13% to $231.93 in after-hours trading on August 26, after a close that left the stock down 22% for the year.

The $2.61 Billion Line That Did the Work

Robin Washington, president and chief financial and operating officer, said net-new annual order value growth was the strongest in four years and that the company is on track for a second-half organic reacceleration. Subscription and support revenue was $10.8 billion, up 12%, including $440 million from Informatica, the data firm Salesforce closed in November 2025. Informatica added $456 million to total revenue.

GAAP diluted earnings were $4.29 a share, up 119%. Non-GAAP diluted earnings were $5.90, up 103%. GAAP operating margin was 20.5%; non-GAAP operating margin was 34.1%. Operating cash flow was $1.3 billion, up 71%, and free cash flow was $1.1 billion, up 81%. The company paid $364 million in dividends and kept working through a $25 billion accelerated share repurchase that initially delivered 103 million shares. Diluted shares fell to 821 million from 962 million a year earlier. Final ASR settlement is due in October 2026.

The income statement still has to be read top to bottom. Gains on strategic investments were $2.61 billion, against $6 million a year earlier. Interest expense rose to $473 million from $67 million. Current remaining performance obligation, the contracted revenue due in the next 12 months, was $33.5 billion, up 14%. Remaining performance obligation was $66.3 billion, up 11%.

Q2 FY27 VERSUS A YEAR EARLIER

Salesforce Ventures has backed Anthropic since a Series C check of about $50 million in 2023. By June 2026 the holding was worth about $5 billion. That stake now sits inside the same quarter as Claudeforce, so the model maker is at once a portfolio company, a supplier, and a distribution partner.

Claudeforce Puts Salesforce Inside Claude

On the same day as results, Salesforce and Anthropic announced Claudeforce, an expanded partnership that runs in both directions. The first shipping piece is Salesforce in Claude, a plugin with 37 prebuilt sales skills covering meeting prep, deal health, and pipeline review. Select pilots have it now. Open beta is due in September 2026, with more skills later in the year. Pricing was not disclosed. The release says pricing and packaging are subject to change.

Actions route back through Salesforce so existing business rules still apply. An admin connects the plugin once for the whole team. The other direction is already further along: Claude is a reasoning model for the Atlas engine, the default for Agentforce Vibes and Agentforce Coworker, and available in Agent Builder. Through Amazon Bedrock, Claude can run inside Salesforce’s Trust Boundary, which matters for banks, insurers, and other regulated buyers. Anthropic had already made Claude a preferred model for regulated industries inside Agentforce in October 2025.

THE FOUR LEGS OF CLAUDEFORCE

• Salesforce in Claude: A plugin with 37 sales skills that reads live CRM context and writes governed updates from the chat.
• Claude in Agentforce: Default reasoning for Vibes and Coworker, plus a model choice in Agent Builder and Atlas.
• Slack as the workspace: Claude is the default model for Slack AI and Slackbot, and a founding partner for Slack Code.
• Mutual customers: Salesforce is Anthropic’s preferred CRM and Slack home; Claude is Salesforce’s preferred assistant for developers and knowledge workers.

Marc Benioff, chair and CEO, framed the bet as a fusion of two kinds of software.

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.

Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce

Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO and co-founder, put the commercial activity in Salesforce’s systems at the center of the pitch.

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

The unspoken trade is who owns the screen. If sellers live in Claude and only touch Salesforce as a permissioned back end, the CRM still meters the data and the workflow. The chat company meters the tokens. Until packaging is public, that split is the product.

What the Guidance Raise Buys

Salesforce raised full-year revenue guidance by $200 million on a reported basis, $300 million in constant currency, to a range of $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion, up 11% to 12% as reported and 11% in constant currency. Prior guidance was $45.9 billion to $46.2 billion. Informatica is expected to add slightly above 3 points to full-year growth.

The bridge is more useful than the headline. Management allocated $100 million to organic strength in Agentforce, Data 360, and Slack, $200 million to Contentful and Fin, and subtracted $100 million for a stronger dollar. Non-GAAP operating margin guidance stayed at 34.3%. GAAP operating margin guidance moved to 20.1%. Free cash flow growth guidance stayed at about 4% to 5%. Full-year non-GAAP earnings guidance moved to $16.67 to $16.71 a share from $14.06 to $14.12, helped by the smaller share count as well as operations.

Third-quarter revenue is guided to $11.42 billion to $11.50 billion, up 11% to 12%, including slightly above 4 points from Informatica. Third-quarter cRPO growth is guided at about 14%, and that figure excludes Contentful and Fin. Washington also pointed to headwinds and volatility in licenses for integration and analytics software, so the organic $100 million is concentrated in the AI and Slack stack, not the whole catalog.

Agentforce Crossed $1.5 Billion in ARR

The AI products are no longer a slide. Agentforce annual recurring revenue exceeded $1.5 billion, up more than 240%. Starting this quarter that figure includes Slackbot and Headless 360. Combined Agentforce and Data 360 ARR reached nearly $3.9 billion, up more than 210%. Bookings from the premium Agentforce One Edition and Agentforce for Apps SKUs more than doubled quarter over quarter.

Usage is moving with the bookings. Salesforce said it has delivered 7.0 billion Agentic Work Units to date, 3.2 billion of them in the quarter, up 97% from the prior quarter. Data 360 ingested 104 trillion records, up 355%, including 82 trillion through Zero Copy, up 731%, and processed 22 terabytes of unstructured data. Accounts with agents in production grew 70% sequentially.

THE AI RUN-RATE SNAPSHOT

• Agentforce ARR: More than $1.5 billion, up over 240%, now including Slackbot and Headless 360.
• AI and data ARR: Nearly $3.9 billion for Agentforce plus Data 360, up over 210%.
• Work units: 3.2 billion in the quarter, 7.0 billion since launch, up 97% sequentially.
• cRPO: $33.5 billion, up 14%, the fastest bookings growth Salesforce has posted in four years on that measure.

Benioff said ARR is about to cross $4 billion and that AI is showing up in every layer of the platform. He also said nine of the ten leading AI companies already run Salesforce and Slack, with that cohort’s spend up 435% year over year. Those are vendor figures, and they describe concentration among model labs as much as broad enterprise conversion. They still sit next to a core that needed Informatica to print 11% growth.

The Default Model Now Lives in Slack

Slack posted its fastest quarterly net-new annual order value growth since Salesforce bought it. Slackbot users grew more than 150% quarter over quarter. Inside Salesforce, Slackbot is credited with 8.1 million hours of annualized productivity gains, more than double the prior quarter. Claude is now the default model for Slack AI, Slackbot, Headless 360, Agentforce Coworker, and Claude Code across Salesforce engineering.

On September 10, 2026, Benioff posted a live Salesforce interface running inside Slack, calling it Slackforce, with Claudeforce aimed at Anthropic’s Cowork product. Dreamforce is where both get a stage.

Welcome Slackforce, powered by Claude. ⚡️ A live Salesforce UI—Sales, Service, Marketing, Tableau, Data 360, and Slack—with governed access in the flow of work. Slackforce for Slack. Claudeforce for Cowork. See both at #DF26. pic.twitter.com/uKJcmtLcVc

— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) September 10, 2026

That is a distribution choice as much as a model choice. If the pane of glass is Slack or Claude, Salesforce still wants to own the objects underneath: records, permissions, audit trails, and the actions that change a deal. Rivals are working the same seam from the other side. Microsoft this month put an AI-powered Dynamics 365 migration tool in front of Salesforce customers, a reminder that the installed base is in play while the interface is being rewritten.

Fin and Contentful Are Already Closed

When guidance was written, Contentful and Fin were still pending. Both have since closed, which turns the $200 million deal contribution from a condition into a starting point for the third quarter.

THE CLOSE CALENDAR

1. June 1, 2026: Salesforce signs a deal for Contentful, a composable content platform used by more than 4,800 brands, to sit inside Headless 360.
2. June 15, 2026: Salesforce agrees to buy Fin, formerly Intercom, for about $3.6 billion, adding a customer-service agent already in market.
3. August 26, 2026: Q2 results and Claudeforce land on the same afternoon; FY27 revenue guidance moves to $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion.
4. September 1, 2026: Contentful closes. The Contentful founders on joining Salesforce said the API-first layer would give Agentforce a content engine across channels.
5. September 10, 2026: Fin closes, bringing more than 30,000 companies and a claimed 76% average end-to-end resolution rate across chat, email, WhatsApp, SMS, voice, and Slack.
6. September 15, 2026: Dreamforce opens in San Francisco, with Investor Day on September 16 at the St. Regis.

Benioff called Fin “the #1 customer agent” meeting “the #1 CRM.” Eoghan McCabe, Fin’s CEO and co-founder, said the point of joining was reach: more businesses, and their customers, on an agent that already finishes the ticket. Contentful fills a different hole, unstructured content for marketing and commerce agents that Data 360 and Agentforce could not assemble on their own.

Claudeforce is still a pilot heading into a conference. Agentforce is a $1.5 billion run-rate product that now includes Slackbot. The $2.61 billion Anthropic mark-up will not repeat on cue; guidance assumes no change in the investment portfolio because the company says future gains and losses cannot be forecast. What repeats, if the bet holds, is sellers opening Claude or Slack and moving a Salesforce record without opening Salesforce. Dreamforce, which runs September 15 to 17, 2026, is where Benioff and Amodei have to show that meter, not another logo lockup.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is Claudeforce?

Claudeforce is the August 26, 2026 expansion of the Salesforce-Anthropic partnership. It puts a Salesforce plugin inside Claude and makes Claude a default reasoning model inside Agentforce and Slack. One administrator connects it for an entire team, and each action still runs through Salesforce so existing rules stay in force. No price list has been published.

How Did the Anthropic Stake Change Q2 Profit?

Net gains on strategic investments were $2.61 billion in the quarter, against $6 million a year earlier, and that line sat under flat $2.33 billion operating income. The same $2.61 billion is larger than the $1.64 billion year-over-year rise in net income, which is why the earnings beat and the software beat are not the same event.

When Did Salesforce Close Fin and Contentful?

Contentful closed on September 1, 2026. Fin closed on September 10, 2026, under a June agreement valued at about $3.6 billion. Both were written into FY27 guidance as a combined $200 million revenue contribution, conditional on closing during the fiscal third quarter.

What Does Agentforce ARR Include After Q2?

Effective this quarter, Agentforce annual recurring revenue includes Slackbot and Headless 360 alongside the core agent products, and the company said that total exceeded $1.5 billion. Combined with Data 360, the AI and data ARR pool was nearly $3.9 billion. Those definitions matter when comparing the figure with Q1, when Agentforce ARR was cited at $1.2 billion before the mix change.

When Does Salesforce’s Fiscal 2027 Year End?

Salesforce’s fiscal 2027 year ends January 31, 2027. The second quarter covered May through July 2026. Third-quarter guidance covers the period ending October 31, 2026, which is also when the $25 billion accelerated share repurchase is expected to reach final settlement.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of Salesforce’s fiscal second-quarter results, guidance, and related product and deal announcements, and it is for information only. It is not investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell Salesforce or any other security, or a forecast of future earnings, margins, or share-price performance. Readers should consult a licensed financial adviser or other qualified professional who can consider their own objectives and risk tolerance before making any investment decision. Figures, product status, and deal terms reflect company statements and filings as of the dates named above and can change with later reports, closes, or restatements.