Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says Claude comes in peace.
“We’re not interested in destroying anyone,” Amodei said on CNBC earlier this week. “We think of this as a very positive sum thing, right?”
With Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff seated beside him, Amodei sought to put to rest Wall Street’s belief that Anthropic aims to conquer all things SaaS. After all, it was an Anthropic announcement in late January about plugins for Claude Cowork, not the four horsemen, that signaled the beginning of what became known as the Saaspocalypse. In one week, roughly $1 trillion in value was wiped out in the software sector.
Since then, some software companies, including Salesforce, have recovered ground. In fact, Thursday was the second-best day ever for Salesforce shares, trailing only a COVID-19 pandemic era boom, CNBC reported.
Benioff, who for months has dismissed concerns about a SaaSpocalypse, took an early victory lap during Salesforce’s second-quarter earnings call. Before the call, Salesforce announced an expanded partnership with Anthropic, which they dubbed “Claudeforce”
“Our seats were supposed to decline. Instead, Agentforce Sales, Services, Slack all saw year-over-year growth,” Benioff said. “We were told customers would abandon us. But attrition is near its lowest level ever.”
Amodei said Anthropic has always wanted to create value for its customers. He said both companies are “big users” of each other’s services.
“This combination is a way to gain something that’s, it’s one plus one equals three, something that’s bigger than the sum of its parts,” he said. “And I think that’s the right way to think about things.”
Critics of frontier labs have spoken out about other concerns. Some, most notably Palantir CEO Alex Karp, have argued that frontier labs like Anthropic should be approached cautiously. Karp has urged companies to keep control of their “alpha” and intellectual property. (Anthropic has said that by default, it does not use inputs or outputs from commercial products for training.)
“Now, I’ve spent a lot of time with Dario and the Anthropic crew,” Karp said earlier this month. “They want to tell you we have to march into a future where we own nothing, where our businesses aren’t profitable, where none of us have jobs, and where our adversaries win.”
Asked about the Salesforce partnership, Amodei said Anthropic was working to ensure companies didn’t have to trade off between “data and privacy and security and safety.”
“We have put a huge amount of effort into managing permissions here,” he said.
