• Anthropic posted a sales job directly targeting one of its biggest customers, Meta.
• The AI lab took down the job posting after Business Insider asked about it.
• Meta and Anthropic have a complicated relationship, as both pushing to develop frontier AI.

Anthropic posted — and then deleted — a job listing for a salesperson tasked with selling to Meta, its AI rival and one of its largest customers.

The listing, titled "Mega Account Executive, Meta," appeared on Anthropic's job board at a delicate moment for the companies' relationship.

Meta still spends hundreds of millions of dollars a month as Anthropic's customer, according to a recent New York Times report. But it's also trying to reduce its reliance on Anthropic's AI tools as Anthropic is shoring up its finances ahead of a massive initial public offering.

The post suggests Anthropic is betting Meta will remain a major customer even as Meta builds more capable AI models of its own.

After Business Insider asked Anthropic about the listing on Wednesday, the company pulled it down. Anthropic and Meta declined to comment.

Anthropic's job posting offered an annual salary of $380,000 to $450,000, and didn't mention Meta outside the title. It said the salesperson would "win new business and drive revenue within a book of strategic digital native accounts."

The listing stands out for its specificity. Other Anthropic account executive openings target broad regions or sectors, including startups in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, or the public sector in Southeast Asia.

Anthropic's AI coding tool, Claude Code, became popular across Silicon Valley, including at Meta, this year. One internal projection said Meta could spend $10 billion annually on Anthropic, the Times reported. Meta's head of AI product, Nat Friedman, told employees that if Meta decreased its reliance on Anthropic's tools, it could hit Anthropic's revenue as it approaches its IPO, the report said.

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• Salesforce has been in talks to acquire AI startup Listen Labs for around $2 billion.
• Listen Labs, which was last valued at $500 million, sells an AI market analysis platform.
• Recent AI M&A deals include Nvidia's $12.9 billion acquisition of AI startup Hugging Face.

Salesforce could be on the hunt for acquisitions to beef up its AI capabilities.

The software giant has recently been in talks to buy Listen Labs, an AI-powered customer research platform for around $2 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. The talks have not been finalized and could ultimately be unsuccessful, according to a person with knowledge of the deal.

Salesforce and Listen Labs did not respond to requests for comment.

Listen Labs was founded in 2023 by Alfred Wahlforss and Florian Juengermann, who first met as undergraduates at Harvard University while building an AI avatar app that went viral, attracting 20,000 users on its first day, according to Sequoia Capital. Juengermann was previously a national champion in competitive programming in Germany.

They used an early version of what would become Listen Labs to interview users, which helped them realize that using AI for market research would be extremely valuable.

The company's software automates much of the qualitative research process, which has typically been expensive and time-consuming.

Customers include Microsoft, Anthropic, Google, Nestle, Sweetgreen, and Perplexity. At the beginning of the year, Listen Labs said it had grown its annualized revenue by 15x and interviewed more than one million people in nine months.

For Salesforce, the deal would strengthen its broader quest to make its agentic AI platform, Agentforce, more than just about automating repetitive work. Listen Labs could boost Agentforce by understanding what customers are thinking. It could recommend which products they might buy and craft the perfect pitch for salespeople to close a deal.

If the deal were finalized, it would be part of a wave of AI acquisitions in recent weeks, with Nvidia acquiring HuggingFace for around $12.9 billion and Stripe buying OpenRouter for around $8 billion.

Salesforce has been pushing to improve its AI efforts, with a particular focus on enterprise agents. The Information reported that they considered acquiring HuggingFace before it was sold to Nvidia.

Listen Labs was last valued at $500 million in a financing round earlier this year. Its backers include Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, Conviction Partners, and Pear VC.