Artificial intelligence firms OpenAI and Anthropic have been hiring from Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM) this year at a rapid clip, with LinkedIn profiles pointing to close to 100 moves since the start of 2026.
Anthropic has hired 45 Salesforce employees over the last six months, and OpenAI has added 40 more to its teams, primarily in sales and marketing and go-to-market roles, The Information reported.
AI companies are targeting Salesforce employees primarily due to their "deep relationships" with Fortune 500 companies.
OpenAI has been on a hiring spree. The company plans to double its workforce from 4,500 to 8,000 by the end of 2026, the Financial Times reported.
Clint Gibler announced on X that he has joined OpenAI as a member of the technical staff and will be working with Michael Aiello, OpenAI's head of product for cyber.
Other recent hires at OpenAI include former Ironclad CEO Jason Boehmig, who will lead its product team responsible for building products for the legal industry and Salesforce AgentExchange CEO Brian Landsman as its vice president of global partnerships.
Denise Dresser, who led Salesforce's Slack business as CEO, departed the company in December to join the ChatGPT maker as the company's Chief Revenue Officer, the Information reported.
Former OpenAI employees Clive Chan and Andrej Karpathy have left OpenAI in recent months to join rival Anthropic.
Salesforce is simultaneously deepening ties with Anthropic. The company plans to spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens in 2026.
“These coding agents are awesome. Anthropic is awesome,” CEO Marc Benioff said on a podcast last month. “I am going to probably use $300 million of Anthropic this year at Salesforce. Coding. Everything’s going to be cheaper to make.”
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