Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said 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, reportedly describing AI coding agents and Anthropic as “awesome” in the same breath. He added that the spending would make everything at Salesforce cheaper to build. Benioff’s plans come in the wake of his previous announcement that Salesforce will not hire any more engineers in 2025 due to productivity gains from AI.
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 will be hiring 1,000 fresh graduates “to ride the AI exponential.”
Interestingly, 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. Then 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.
