The Anthropic API is the official developer platform for accessing Claude, Anthropic's family of large language models, through a programmatic interface for building AI-powered applications. Distinct from the Claude consumer chatbot at claude.ai, the Anthropic API is designed for developers and enterprises who need to integrate Claude's capabilities directly into their own products, services, and workflows. The platform provides RESTful API endpoints for chat completions, text generation, vision analysis, tool use (function calling), and extended thinking, with support for streaming responses and batch processing. Anthropic offers multiple model tiers through the API, including Claude Opus for the highest capability, Claude Sonnet for a balance of intelligence and speed, and Claude Haiku for fast, cost-effective tasks. All models support context windows of up to 200,000 tokens, enabling processing of entire codebases, lengthy documents, and complex datasets in a single request. The Anthropic Console serves as the developer dashboard, providing API key management, usage monitoring, billing controls, prompt playground for testing, and Workbench tools for evaluating model outputs. The API supports advanced features including structured JSON output, system prompts, multi-turn conversations, image understanding, PDF analysis, and computer use capabilities where Claude can interact with desktop applications. Anthropic provides official SDKs for Python and TypeScript, along with comprehensive documentation and cookbooks for common integration patterns. The API follows pay-per-token pricing with rates varying by model, and offers volume discounts through committed use agreements. Claude models are also accessible through Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud Vertex AI for organizations that prefer to access them within their existing cloud infrastructure. Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, former members of OpenAI, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
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