Salesforce Stock Jumps 14% After Anthropic Deal, But the EPS Beat Ran Through a $2.6 Billion Investment Gain

Salesforce's Q2 fiscal 2027 earnings, reported Wednesday, August 26, delivered the stock's biggest single-day pop in years. Shares jumped roughly 14% in extended trading, according to Reuters, coverage carried by The Star (Malaysia), closing out a stretch where the stock had been down about 22% for the year through Wednesday's close.

The trigger was twofold: a guidance raise and a new AI partnership called Claudeforce, announced jointly with Anthropic. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff used the earnings call to take a direct shot at the bear case that's dogged his stock all year, telling investors, "This nonsense of the SaaSpocalypse, I think it's time for it to stop," according to salesforceben.

What actually happened in the numbers

Salesforce reported revenue of $11.35 billion for the quarter ended July 31, up 11% year-over-year, according to Reuters. Current remaining performance obligation, a forward bookings measure, hit $33.5 billion, up 14% and above the StreetAccount consensus of $33.22 billion, per 24/7 Wall St.

The company raised full-year fiscal 2027 revenue guidance to $46.1 billion-$46.4 billion, up from a prior range of $45.9 billion-$46.2 billion set in May. Reuters reported that raise is driven partly by "anticipated contribution from the expected closings of its Contentful and Fin acquisitions," deals announced back in June that haven't closed yet.

Adjusted earnings per share came in at $5.90, which 24/7 Wall St. and AOL both note matched consensus rather than beating it. GAAP net income hit $3.53 billion, or $4.29 per diluted share. Reuters reported that figure included a $2.53-per-share gain "on an adjusted basis from its strategic investments" in the quarter, tied to Salesforce's stake in Anthropic. Salesforce also raised its adjusted EPS forecast to $16.67-$16.71, up from $14.06-$14.12, a jump Reuters attributes in part to "a reduction in share count" from buybacks.

The AI-agent business is growing fast on its own merits, but headline profit growth this quarter was substantially inflated by a mark-to-market gain on an investment, not by selling more software.

The Anthropic numbers that are real

Strip out the investment gain and there's still a legitimate growth story. Agentforce annual recurring revenue topped $1.5 billion for the quarter, up more than 240% year-over-year, according to Tech Times and confirmed across multiple outlets. Combined with Data Cloud, the AI platform ARR reached nearly $3.9 billion, up more than 210% year-over-year.

Customers completed 3.2 billion "Agentic Work Units" in the quarter, up 97% from the prior quarter, with 7 billion delivered across Agentforce and Slack to date, per 24/7 Wall St. That usage growth is a hard operational number, not a paper gain.

What Claudeforce actually does

Claudeforce is two products bolted together. The first, called Salesforce in Claude, is a plugin with 37 prebuilt sales skills, letting sellers query live CRM data, run deal-health reviews, and trigger record updates directly from inside a Claude conversation, according to VentureBeat. It's live for select pilot customers now, with a broader open beta planned for September.

The second piece makes Claude the default reasoning model across Salesforce's own Atlas Reasoning Engine, powering Agentforce and replacing the prior model behind Slackbot, per TechRadar and salesforceben. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei framed the deal as validation of Claude's enterprise reliability: "We believe frontier intelligence should be safe, trusted, and deeply capable, which is why the world's leading businesses turn to Claude for their most important work."

VentureBeat's interview with Salesforce president Patrick Stokes offers the most candid admission in the coverage. Stokes told VentureBeat that after Salesforce opened up its systems to AI agents in March, "customers rushed to wire Salesforce's MCP servers into agentic interfaces... but really, Claude rose to the top." Salesforce is now building its product around the reality that customers wanted to work through a competitor's chatbot rather than its own screens. Stokes compared the ambition to what Claude Code did for software developers, applied now to knowledge workers generally.

The sector-wide read, and the counter-argument bears still have

The rally wasn't isolated to Salesforce. ServiceNow climbed 5% and Adobe rose 3% in sympathy, according to 24/7 Wall St. and AOL, while the iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF (IGV) gained 3%, outpacing the Nasdaq-100-tracking QQQ's 0.8% move, a signal the rotation was concentrated in enterprise software rather than broad tech.

The bear case Benioff dismissed as "nonsense" isn't baseless on its face: the argument has been that generative AI models could disintermediate legacy CRM platforms entirely, letting companies manage sales pipelines through a chatbot instead of paying for Salesforce licenses. Salesforce's own admission that customers were routing work through Claude rather than its native interface is, read one way, evidence for that exact disruption thesis. Wednesday's report reframes it as expansion rather than replacement, but the guidance raise leans partly on unclosed acquisitions and the profit jump leaned on investment gains, not proof the disruption risk is gone.

What happens next hinges on the September open beta for Salesforce in Claude and whether Agentforce's ARR growth holds up once the current wave of "prepackaged, easier-to-deploy AI agents" — in the words of Valoir CEO Rebecca Wettemann, quoted by Reuters — becomes the market standard rather than a differentiator.