Salesforce is expecting big returns from its investment in Anthropic, which it chose as an alternative after it was unable to invest in OpenAI.

Business Insider reported on Sept. 22 that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff (마크 베니오프) said the company’s investment decision may have turned out to be advantageous.

Benioff said in a podcast interview that he initially wanted to invest in OpenAI. He said he knew Sam Altman well and had expressed interest in investing, but Salesforce could not invest in OpenAI because of its relationship with Microsoft.

The decision was shaped by the existing structure tying Microsoft and OpenAI. Microsoft holds about a 27 percent stake in OpenAI and also has the right to use OpenAI technology in its products. It also sells access to OpenAI models through Azure. In the enterprise software market, Microsoft is also a competitor to Salesforce.

Benioff said the situation changed Salesforce’s investment direction. He said, "We couldn’t go here and had no choice but to go elsewhere," adding that the Anthropic investment was not the result of identifying a particular winner from the start. He added, "It wasn’t that we were so smart that we found an overlooked winner."

He said he now sees greater business value in that choice. Benioff stressed that the relationship between Salesforce and Anthropic has developed beyond a simple financial investment into close business collaboration. Salesforce’s Slackbot and other new interfaces run based on Anthropic’s AI model Claude.

Benioff said of the cooperation, "We have become very close with Anthropic," and added, "This investment could make us not billions of dollars, but maybe tens of billions of dollars." He did not disclose the size of the stake as grounds for the expected returns, but he mentioned both business cooperation and the possibility of a rise in the value of the stake.

Salesforce has not disclosed how much of Anthropic it currently owns. If Anthropic pursues an initial public offering, Salesforce’s stake could be assigned a public market value, and over the long term a route for selling the stake could open.

Anthropic has been preparing for the possibility of listing, but the timing is still uncertain. OpenAI is also considering a listing, but Sam Altman has said an OpenAI IPO will not take place in 2026.

This trend shows that the landscape for generative AI investment is shifting beyond simple equity stakes toward business partnerships and product integration competition. Salesforce could not invest directly in OpenAI, but it is building its relationship with Anthropic into a strategic asset by linking Claude to its services. The points to watch are when Anthropic moves ahead with a listing and how much Salesforce can translate the partnership into actual profits and product competitiveness.