Salesforce Surges 22% on Earnings Beat and 'Claudeforce' AI Partnership with Anthropic

Salesforce stock rocketed 22% on Thursday — its second-best single-day gain ever, behind only a ~26% jump in August 2020 — after the enterprise software giant delivered a strong second-quarter earnings report and announced a high-profile AI collaboration with Anthropic dubbed 'Claudeforce.' The partnership embeds a Salesforce-built plug-in directly into Anthropic's Claude chatbot, giving salespeople frictionless access to CRM data through a frontier AI interface. CEO Marc Benioff and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei jointly unveiled the effort on CNBC.

The financials were striking. Salesforce posted Q2 revenue of $11.35 billion, edging past the $11.32 billion consensus estimate, and up 11% year over year. More dramatically, adjusted EPS came in at $5.90 — nearly double the $3.27 analysts had forecast. Net income surged 87% year over year to $3.53 billion, compared to $1.89 billion in the same period last year.

A significant chunk of that profit windfall came from an unexpected source: a $2.6 billion gain on Salesforce's strategic investment in Anthropic, whose valuation has now climbed to $965 billion ahead of its widely anticipated IPO. That investment has transformed from a strategic bet into a massive balance-sheet asset, adding a new dimension to Salesforce's AI story.

The rally had a contagion effect across the software sector. Adobe, Palantir, ServiceNow, Autodesk, and Figma all moved higher, and the iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF climbed roughly 5%. The move provided relief to a sector that has been under pressure all year amid fears that generative AI could cannibalize the SaaS business model. Benioff pushed back forcefully on that narrative, arguing that two quarters of dire predictions about AI 'eating' software have simply not materialized for Salesforce.