CEO Marc Benioff has said that his software firm expects to spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens this year, almost entirely for coding.
Benioff announced his plans during the All-In podcast on Friday, reportedly describing AI coding agents and Anthropic “awesome” in the same breath. He added that the spending would make everything at Salesforce cheaper to build.
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 into an AI model, it breaks it down into tokens to process the information, based on which, it generates an output. Every LLM, such as ChatGPT or Notebook, has a maximum number of tokens it can read and write at a given time. AI companies charge you based on tokens, such as $2 per million tokens.
AI, not engineers for coding
Benioff’s plans, coupled with that Salesforce will not hire any more engineers in 2025 due to productivity gains from AI, signal a clear shift — the automation of writing code.
The Salesforce CEO has been a vocal proponent of the theory that AI is not killing entry-level jobs but transforming them. He had said last month that his software firm “to ride the AI exponential.”
In fact in the last two years, Benioff has walked on both ends of the sword — announcing layoffs, freezing hiring and recruiting freshers.
In February 2026, Salesforce reportedly cut nearly 1,000 job roles across marketing and product management due to AI automation.
In September 2025, Benioff announced cutting down 4,000-odd job roles in customer support on the back of AI automation.
And in December 2024, the CEO had announced freezing hiring for new software engineers, citing a 30% productivity gain driven internally by their autonomous AI system, Agentforce, along with other AI tools.
At the same time, Benioff explicitly carved out a hiring push for 1,000 to 2,000 new sales representatives as Salesforce urgently needed humans on the ground to pitch and explain complex enterprise AI products to corporate clients.
“I’m probably the last CEO that you’ll meet who only managed humans,” Benioff had said during an interview. “All of us going forward are going to manage humans and agents together,” a term he labelled ‘digital labour revolution.’
A $300 million annual token bill from a single customer would make Salesforce one of Anthropic’s largest commercial accounts, though neither company has confirmed the figure in official disclosures.