Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Kicks Off Dreamforce With Keynote Presentation

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff delivering the keynote at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco (Jessica Christian/Getty Images)

Salesforce gets more direct about rivals and more vocal about customers

CEO Marc Benioff likened competitors ServiceNow and Veeva to “purgatory” and named specific customers Salesforce says it’s taken from them.

Rani Molla

2/26/26 10:22AM

Even for a company known for taking digs at competitors and name-dropping clients, Salesforce’s latest earnings call was a standout.

A review of the past 10 years of the workplace software company’s earnings transcripts suggests a shift from indirectly knocking old, siloed “legacy” competitors like Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle to directly attacking newer, more niche upstarts.

Here’s CEO Marc Benioff:

“I especially loved five customers who get to leave the purgatory of ServiceNow. Like Sunrun, Cornerstone, CoolSys, and there’s others too that we’re not allowed to mention, but I might mention them anyway, who are leaving ServiceNow now for the new Salesforce IT service product, which is about apps and agents, helping you manage all your ITSM.

But don’t just think it’s just that. We built an amazing new life sciences product this year: Agentforce for Life Sciences. And since we launched so many of the global pharma companies, and I’ve met with so many of the CEOs myself, they’re leaving Veeva — the purgatory of Veeva — including AstraZeneca, Novartis, Takeda, and, of course, Albert [Bourla] at Pfizer. They’re all saying that they are going to Salesforce Life Sciences, which is a product that has apps and agents. And this is amazing. They are the most regulated businesses in the world. And they’re choosing Salesforce.”

So not only did he criticize competitors ServiceNow and Veeva as “purgatory,” but he also named specific customers Salesforce claims to have taken from them.

That’s far more direct than many of Salesforce’s historical digs, which involved highlighting competitors as “old,” “legacy,” “siloed,” and structurally non-cloud-native.

“If you go look at some of these legacy companies that are trying to get in the game of the front office and say that they’re now CRM companies, it’s not in their DNA,” Benioff’s then co-CEO Keith Block said in 2017.

The latest earnings call also marks a departure from simply listing all its happy customers, which Benioff did in spades, per usual.

This time Salesforce invited three of them — the CEOs of Wyndham Hotels and SharkNinja, as well as the founder of SaaStr — on the call itself, in what looked like a cross between a YouTube podcast and an infomercial.

Benioff didn’t have to say how great he thinks his products were. His guests delivered testimonials for him.

What should we make of these earnings call changes? Certainly one could argue they’re a sign of either strength or weakness, which likely depends on whether you interpreted the company’s earnings as positive (revenue beat expectations and is growing faster than it had been!) or negative (part of that growth came from the acquisition of Informatica!).

Investors themselves seem unsure: the stock was down 5% after the market closed yesterday but is currently up around 3% as traders continue to digest the earnings.

But perhaps the biggest beneficiaries are ServiceNow and Veeva. By naming them directly, Salesforce elevated them — and signaled that it considers them serious competition.

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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.

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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