Highlights
- Salesforce’s stock shows the value of the company has collapsed to roughly 40% of its all-time high in 2024.
- AI companies like Anthropic are being valued at multiple times that of Salesforce.
- Anthropic has always leaned into the B2B strategy, allowing it to grow quicker than its competitors. It also places them in a strategic partnership with Salesforce.
- If Anthropic were to purchase Salesforce, they would immediately gain credentials when working with regulated industries, and over 150,000 new customers with strong cross-sell potential.
Salesforce’s stock price has fallen drastically since the dawn of the AI boom. The behemoth was once valued over a monumental $350B USD in December 2024/January 2025. Today, the company has been discounted to a meager $130B overall.
Salesforce has been selling the AI narrative hard for many years. Their investment in Agentforce backs this up, but their delivery has stumbled. Given its current lower value, especially compared to powerful AI companies like Anthropic, would it make sense for an AI giant to take Salesforce private through acquisition, and empower the company in a whole new way?
AI Delivering Slow SaaS Growth
Salesforce has been the world’s leading pure-play SaaS provider for years, with over 150,000 customers around the world including Amazon, Spotify, and Toyota. In FY25, they recorded $37.5B of revenue. There are companies with larger revenue overall (such as Microsoft, with $281.7B revenue), but Salesforce was the largest for a pure-play SaaS business.
Most SaaS companies, Salesforce included, are struggling with a growth issue. While their revenue is still increasing, and profitability is growing, the acceleration has slowed. The company’s stock value (NYSE:CRM) has cratered as a result. The clearest reason is that the era of digital transformation is over. Most businesses today are digital-first.
Apple Inc (NYSE:AAPL) was the first company in the world to hit a $1T market cap back in 2018, sitting at closer to $4.17T today. Nvidia sits at roughly $4.6T after a significant AI boom. Anthropic is valued at roughly ~1T (over 7.5x Salesforce’s value) and is rumoured to be eyeing an early 2027 IPO.
It’s clear that AI is here to stay, and has totally shuffled the landscape. Tech companies are valuable, but none are as valuable as those involved in the AI space. If they wanted to, Anthropic could make an acquisition offer to purchase the CRM giant right now. Yes, that’s a hugely oversimplified statement, but bear with me…
Already Closer Than You Think
If they were to pull the trigger, it wouldn’t be an out-of-the-blue move from Anthropic. Salesforce Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm, has already invested heavily into Anthropic. They invested $50m in Anthropic back in 2023 as a Series C round, and continued to invest in their Series F ($13b) and Series G ($5b).
Notably, if Anthropic were to acquire Salesforce, this would buck a historic trend. Salesforce typically invests in the companies that they themselves ultimately acquire (MuleSoft, Vlocity, Slack, and Informatica, for example). As Salesforce has invested in Anthropic multiple times, this would mark the first (and would be only) time that the CRM giant has invested in an acquirer, rather than being the acquired!
Anthropic’s flagship product, Claude, is also deeply embedded across several Salesforce products. Anthropic and Salesforce recently jointly announced Claude Tag, an upgraded Claude for Slack tool that introduces a multiplayer agent that users can invoke from Slack. Anthropic’s models are also available within various Agentforce tools.
Notably, Anthropic was also the first LLM provider that was fully integrated into Salesforce’s trust boundary, with all Claude’s traffic directly contained within Salesforce’s virtual private cloud. Not only that, but Anthropic has Salesforce’s blood flowing through its veins. They’ve previously hired leadership from Salesforce, with half of Salesforce’s GTM leadership team jumping ship in early 2026.
Anthropic and Salesforce are no stranger to one another. There are clearly many strategic benefits that come from integrating the tools together, empowering businesses to put their data to work in all new ways.
Why Anthropic?
Salesforce as a company is extremely valuable to any big AI player. Realistically, only a drastically larger player like Microsoft could acquire the wounded SaaS giant in 2026. The only problem is that Microsoft is already in bed with OpenAI, Anthropic’s largest competitor. It wouldn’t make sense for them to discard one of their biggest partners to acquire Salesforce.
There’s also one major difference between how Anthropic and OpenAI have positioned themselves and grown in the last few years. OpenAI’s focus has been primarily in the B2C space, beginning with the launch of ChatGPT (powered by the third-generation OpenAI GPT product) in 2023. Anthropic, however, has been leaning much more towards their B2B audience. They’ve always touted a safety-first narrative, which is critical for businesses that guard copious amounts of private customer data.
Anthropic’s focus on B2B has enabled them to grow rapidly. It has also put Salesforce in their crosshairs as a key strategic partner, with over 150,000 customers who have been primed on the AI narrative.
Symbiosis
If Anthropic were to put a successful acquisition bid forward (which wouldn’t happen until after their official IPO), they would make some major gains that align with their growth strategy overnight. They’d gain instant distribution to every major enterprise on the planet. They’d have the ability to leverage a trusted brand to help sell into regulated industries (Salesforce’s Trust Layer is key to this). There’s no denying that Salesforce customers are hungry for AI tooling, as they’ve been primed for it for the last few years – Anthropic would have tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of cross-sell opportunities on day one.
Salesforce investors would also benefit. They would have an investment exit at a meaningful premium to the current stock price (assuming an offer for over $150B or more, to be taken seriously).
Summary
A future where Salesforce joins Anthropic’s ranks is not so far-fetched. Salesforce would be empowered with what is arguably the most powerful LLM tools on the planet, as a first-party tooling option. Salesforce would become the most agentically-powered enterprise SaaS offering on the planet overnight. Salesforce’s Trust Layer empowers Anthropic to build credibility at a similar speed to their AI growth in regulated markets.
Do you think this is a possibility, or even a probable outcome in the next few years? What positives or negatives do you see emerging from such an agreement? Regardless, it shows the need to upskill in the AI space if you haven’t already.
