Abstract:
On August 29, according to Business Insider, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Amodei said the company’s AI assistant Claude is here to “peacefully coexist”, not destroy other industries. "We have no intention of destroying anyone," Amodei told CNBC earlier this week. "We think this is a mutually beneficial thing, right?"
Amodei
Amodei sat next to the software company Salesforce during the interview CEO Marc Benioff. He sought to dispel the perception on Wall Street that Anthropic aims to conquer the entire software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry. At the end of January this year, Anthropic announced the launch of a plug-in for Claude Cowork, kicking off what was later called the "SaaS apocalypse."
At that time, in just one week, the market value of the software industry evaporated by approximately US$1 trillion. Since then, some software companies, including Salesforce, have regained lost ground. According to CNBC, this Thursday was the second-best trading day in the history of Salesforce’s stock price, second only to the surge during the epidemic.
Amodei said that Anthropic is always committed to creating value for customers. He said both companies are "big customers" of each other's services. "This combination is a way of realizing that one plus one equals three, something that is greater than the sum of its parts," he said. "I think that's the right way to look at it."
Benioff has been dismissive of fears of a "SaaS apocalypse" for months. When Salesforce announced its second-quarter financial results, he started "celebrating victory" early. Before the earnings call, Salesforce announced an expanded partnership with Anthropic, which it called "Claudeforce."
"Originally it was expected that our paying users would decrease. The result was just the opposite. Agentforce Sales, Service, and Slack all achieved year-on-year growth," Benioff said. "Some people once said that customers would abandon us. But the customer churn rate is close to the lowest level in history."
Frontier AI companies also face doubts from other aspects. Some critics, notably Palantir CEO Alex Karp, believe cutting-edge AI companies like Anthropic should be treated with caution. Karp called on companies to firmly control their "core advantages" (alpha) and intellectual property. Anthropic says that by default it does not use inputs or outputs from commercial products to train models.
When asked about working with Salesforce, Amodei said Anthropic is working to ensure that companies don't have to make "trade-offs between data, privacy, security and security."
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