TL;DRAnthropic’s Claude Tag works as a rival AI teammate inside Slack. Salesforce promoted it publicly, but employees worry it competes with their own Slackbot and Agentforce.
When Anthropic launched Claude Tag on Tuesday, a high-profile AI product that works as a persistent teammate inside Slack channels, some employees at Salesforce, which owns Slack, were confused. Salesforce promoted Anthropic’s new product on social media even as it competes directly with Salesforce’s own Slackbot and Agentforce platform, The Information reported.
The tension is structural. Salesforce spent $27.7 billion acquiring Slack in 2021 and has invested heavily in turning Slackbot into an agentic AI system. In March, Salesforce unveiled more than 30 new AI capabilities for Slackbot, including meeting transcription, desktop activity monitoring, task execution through third-party tools, and lightweight CRM functions. All of those features run on Anthropic’s Claude.
Now Claude Tag offers a parallel experience inside the same platform. Users can type @Claude in any channel to assign tasks, and the AI breaks them into stages and works through them in public view. An ambient mode proactively jumps into conversations to flag updates, surface context from other channels, and follow up on forgotten threads. It accumulates institutional knowledge over time rather than starting fresh with every interaction.
