Salesforce jumps 12% on earnings beat and 'Claudeforce' with Anthropic

Salesforce shares rose as much as 14 percent in after-hours trading Wednesday and were still up roughly 12 percent in premarket trading Thursday, after the company beat second-quarter estimates by a wide margin, raised its full-year guidance, and unveiled a deeper alliance with Anthropic called Claudeforce.

The quarter itself was strong on its own terms. Adjusted earnings per share came in at $5.90, more than double the year-earlier figure and well above the $3.27 Wall Street had expected. Revenue rose 11 percent year over year to $11.35 billion, edging past the $11.32 billion consensus. Salesforce raised its outlook across the board: third-quarter revenue guidance of $11.42 billion to $11.50 billion, full-year revenue of $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion, and full-year adjusted earnings per share of $16.67 to $16.71, against a prior Street estimate of $14.14.

One part of that profit beat is worth separating from the rest. Salesforce holds an equity stake in Anthropic, and this quarter's results include a $2.6 billion gain from marking that stake up in value — an investment gain tied to Anthropic's rising valuation, not to Salesforce's software sales. Strip that out and the operating beat is still real, just smaller than the adjusted EPS figure alone suggests.

Claudeforce is the news story layered on top of the numbers. Salesforce and Anthropic are expanding their partnership so that Claude users can pull Salesforce data and act on it directly inside Anthropic's chat interface, launching with 37 pre-built sales skills — drafting emails, updating records and similar tasks — without switching to Salesforce's own apps. CEO Marc Benioff said the company is on pace to spend $300 million on Anthropic's models in 2026, primarily for software development work, and pointed to combined annualized revenue from Salesforce's own Agentforce and Data Cloud AI products approaching $3.9 billion, up more than 210 percent from a year earlier.

None of this is investment advice: premarket moves are volatile and can narrow or reverse once regular trading opens.

Disclosure: NewUJ's editorial process uses Anthropic's Claude models. This article was written from published reporting and held to the same sourcing standards as any other story on this site.