Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 23, 2025 (Halil Sagirkaya/Getty Images)

Eye on AI

Salesforce beats on earnings but posts light full-year guidance

The SaaS company posted results for the fourth quarter and full 2026 fiscal year on Wednesday.

Rani Molla

2/25/26 4:15PM

Salesforce reported fourth-quarter earnings for fiscal year 2026 after the bell Wednesday, beating analysts’ earnings expectations but providing light full-year 2027 guidance. The company posted:

Adjusted earnings per share of $3.81, beating Wall Street’s expectation of $3.05.
Revenue of $11.2 billion, in line with the FactSet consensus estimate of $11.19 billion.
Revenue guidance for fiscal year 2027 of $45.80 billion to $46.20 billion and adjusted EPS of $13.11 to $13.19, which is potentially lower than the $46.1 billion in revenue and $13.12 EPS analysts had expected.

The stock is down over 4% after-hours.

Reflecting its “strong trajectory,” Salesforce authorized a $50 billion share buyback and increased its dividend by nearly 6% to $0.44 per share.

“Salesforce delivered a record Q4 as our customers’ shift to the Agentic Enterprise surges, fueling NNAOV acceleration in H2 FY26,” Robin Washington, Salesforce president and chief financial officer, said in the press release.

Fourth-quarter GAAP operating margins fell to 16.7% from 18.2% a year earlier, in part due to higher stock-based compensation and increased amortization of acquisition-related costs.

On the earnings call today, investors will be looking for more information on adoption of its AI offerings, which have been suffering from narrative headwinds.

After rallying last quarter, Salesforce shares have fallen about 30% year to date as investors weigh how advances in AI — including new enterprise-focused features from companies like Anthropic — could threaten parts of its core business. A number of analysts have cut price targets amid these concerns.

Still, some bulls say the sell-off is overdone. Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives has called it a buying opportunity, arguing that entrenched incumbents like Salesforce are well positioned to monetize AI among their existing user base.

Recent commentary from Anthropic’s own AI event suggests a more nuanced outcome. As Deutsche Bank wrote afterward, “We have even greater conviction that model providers are unlikely to displace software incumbents and are instead positioning themselves and their agents to be an orchestration layer on top of existing and incumbent systems.”

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5