# Salesforce Keeps Promoting Anthropic's Claude Tag Inside Its Own Slack > Source: > Published: 2026-07-09 12:01:52+00:00 *Salesforce owns Slack, and Slack's owner is now marketing an Anthropic product that makes its own Slackbot look redundant.* Salesforce spent $27.7 billion buying Slack in 2021 so that one day it could sell you an AI agent to run inside it. Instead, this summer, Salesforce is helping a competitor's AI agent move into the same building. On June 23, Anthropic launched Claude Tag, an always-on version of Claude that lives inside Slack channels and answers to a simple @Claude mention. Assign it a task and it breaks the work into stages, works through them with whatever tools it can reach, and reports back in the thread, according to Anthropic's own announcement and reporting from TechCrunch. Leave it alone and its ambient mode starts working on its own, flagging updates across channels, surfacing context your team forgot it had, and following up on threads that went cold weeks ago. The tool is currently in beta for Slack customers on Anthropic's Enterprise and Team plans, and Anthropic says it plans to bring the same always-on approach to Microsoft Teams, email, and other project management tools in the coming weeks. That should worry Salesforce. The company has spent the years since the Slack deal building Slackbot and Agentforce, its own AI agent platform, on top of it. Agentforce has reached $800 million in annual recurring revenue, according to Salesforce's own disclosures. Claude Tag does much of what those products promise, running inside the exact same app. Yet Salesforce promoted the launch on social media instead of quietly tolerating it. The Information reported that employees and partners are confused about the strategy, with some internally describing the gap between Slackbot and Claude Tag as miniscule. Anthropic's own Andrej Karpathy did not help calm things down, posting on X that Claude Tag is not a feature like some crappy Slack bot. You do not promote a rival's product inside your own platform by accident. Salesforce's math here has nothing to do with Slack seats. It has to do with what Salesforce owns. Salesforce first invested roughly $50 million in Anthropic back in 2023, according to Bloomberg reporting cited by The Next Web, and has added to that position in every funding round since. Anthropic closed a $30 billion round in February at a $380 billion valuation, then closed a $65 billion Series H in June at a $965 billion valuation and confidentially filed paperwork for an IPO with the SEC on June 1, according to Fortune and CNBC. Salesforce's stake is now worth roughly $5 billion, about two thirds of its entire strategic investment portfolio. Then there is the token bill. Marc Benioff has said Salesforce expects to spend $300 million on Anthropic's models this year, mostly for coding work, and has credited AI tools including Agentforce with productivity gains of more than 30 percent across its engineering teams. Put those numbers next to Agentforce's $800 million in revenue and the incentive is obvious. A few hundred million dollars of product cannibalization risk is a rounding error against a $5 billion equity stake that is about to get a public market price tag. Blocking Claude Tag to protect Agentforce would cost Salesforce far more in Anthropic upside than it would ever save in Slack subscriptions. This isn't really a story about chatbots. It's a preview of what happens across enterprise software as more incumbents take equity in the AI labs they depend on. Microsoft has run the same logic with OpenAI for years, folding a competitor's technology into its own products because the investment return outweighs the internal turf war. Salesforce is now running an identical playbook in public, mention by mention, inside the app its own employees open every morning. For Agentforce, the open question is what it's actually for once customers can get comparable results by typing @Claude for free inside the same channel. Salesforce Ben, an outlet that covers the ecosystem closely, has already started asking that question in print. Salesforce isn't answering it yet. It's still posting about Claude Tag instead. **Also read:** [Bank of America extends OpenAI its first loan after months of saying no](https://startupfortune.com/bank-of-america-extends-openai-its-first-loan-after-months-of-saying-no/) • [SK Hynix's $28 Billion Nasdaq Listing Draws Sevenfold Investor Demand](https://startupfortune.com/sk-hynixs-28-billion-nasdaq-listing-draws-sevenfold-investor-demand/) • [Man Group Is Betting Big on AI Tokens While Wall Street Debates the Bill](https://startupfortune.com/man-group-is-betting-big-on-ai-tokens-while-wall-street-debates-the-bill/)