AI, not engineers for coding: Salesforce to spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens, CEO Marc Benioff says
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the software firm expects to spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens this year, almost entirely for coding.
Benioff announced his plans on his All-In podcast on Friday, reportedly describing AI coding agents and Anthropic as the word “awesome” in the same breath. He added that the spend would make it cheaper to build everything in Salesforce.
In the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs), tokens are the basic building blocks of text. In other words, when you write a prompt to an AI model, it breaks it down into tokens to process the information and produces an output based on that. Each LLM, like ChatGPT or Notebook, has a maximum number of tokens that it can read and write at a given time. AI companies charge you based on coins, such as $2 per million coins.
Artificial intelligence, not coding engineers
Coupled with Benioff’s plans previous announcement The fact that Salesforce won’t hire more engineers in 2025 due to productivity gains from AI signals a clear shift (automation of coding).
The Salesforce CEO has been a vocal proponent of the theory that AI is not eliminating entry-level jobs, but transforming them. Last month, he said the software firm would hire 1,000 new graduates “to advance artificial intelligence exponentially.”
In fact, Benioff has walked both ends of the sword over the past two years; announced layoffs, freezes hiring and hired new people.
In February 2026, it was reported that Salesforce was cutting nearly 1,000 job roles in marketing and product management due to AI automation.
In September 2025, Benioff announced that 4,000-odd job roles in customer support would be cut, driven by AI automation.
And in December 2024, the CEO announced a hiring freeze for new software engineers, citing the 30% productivity increase internally delivered by the autonomous AI system Agentforce, among other AI tools.
At the same time, Benioff has publicly launched a recruiting campaign for 1,000 to 2,000 new sales reps, as Salesforce urgently needs people in the field to present and explain complex enterprise AI products to enterprise customers.
“I’m probably the last CEO you’ll ever meet who just manages people,” Benioff said during an interview. “Going forward, we will all manage people and agents together,” he said, describing what he called the ‘digital labor revolution’.
The $300 million annual token bill from a single customer would make Salesforce one of Anthropic’s largest business accounts, but neither company has confirmed the figure in official statements.
