Official SDK and API for integrating Claude AI capabilities into applications, providing access to Anthropic's Claude language models.
Official SDK and API for integrating Claude AI capabilities into applications, providing access to Anthropic's Claude language models.
Claude SDK is a developer tools platform that provides official client libraries and API access to Anthropic's Claude language models, with pricing starting at free (pay-as-you-go based on token usage). Built for software engineers, AI application developers, and enterprise teams integrating large language models into production systems, it offers SDKs in Python, TypeScript, Go, Java, Ruby, PHP, C#, and a CLI interface.
The platform is built around two primary developer surfaces: the Messages API for direct model access where developers construct every conversation turn and manage their own tool loops, and Claude Managed Agents for fully managed agent infrastructure with stateful sessions and persistent event history. The SDK exposes the full Claude model family, including Claude Opus 4.6 (claude-opus-4-6) for complex reasoning and coding, Claude Sonnet 4.6 (claude-sonnet-4-6) as the balanced default for production workloads, and Claude Haiku 4.5 (claude-haiku-4-5) for latency-sensitive high-volume applications. Core capabilities include extended thinking, adaptive thinking effort, tool use (web search, web fetch, code execution, bash, computer use, text editor, memory), MCP (Model Context Protocol) connectors, prompt caching, batch processing, PDF support, vision, structured outputs, citations, streaming, and context management features like compaction and context editing.
Claude SDK stands out for its first-class support for agentic workloads, multi-language SDK coverage, and deployment flexibility across AWS Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry. Compared to alternatives like OpenAI's SDK or Google's Gemini API, Claude SDK offers more mature tooling for long-horizon agent tasks, a 200K+ token context window, and native prompt caching that can reduce input token costs by up to 90% on cache reads (per Anthropic's published pricing). It is particularly well-suited for teams building coding assistants, customer support agents, document analysis pipelines, and enterprise AI applications that require reliable tool use and complex reasoning.
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The core Messages API supports extended thinking, where Claude reasons through complex problems before producing a final answer. Developers can control thinking effort with adaptive thinking and task budgets (beta), trading latency for answer quality. This is particularly valuable for coding, math, and multi-step analysis tasks.
The SDK ships with built-in tools for web search, web fetch, code execution, bash, computer use, text editor, and memory, alongside full support for custom developer-defined tools. Programmatic tool calling and fine-grained tool streaming let you build responsive agents that can observe and act on tool outputs mid-generation. This infrastructure is the backbone of agentic applications built on Claude.
A fully managed agent runtime that deploys autonomous agents with stateful sessions and persistent event history, so you don't have to build your own orchestration, memory, or tool loop. It exposes a separate quickstart and API reference and is available on AWS Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry. This dramatically reduces time-to-production for teams building long-running agent systems.
Prompt caching lets you reuse large prefixes (system prompts, retrieved documents, conversation history) across calls at a heavily discounted rate, which is essential for cost-efficient RAG and agent loops. Batch processing runs large asynchronous workloads at reduced cost, ideal for offline evaluation, classification, or dataset labeling. Together they make Claude competitive for high-volume production use.
The SDK includes native support for the Model Context Protocol through remote MCP servers and an MCP connector, standardizing how Claude integrates with external tools, data sources, and services. This makes it easier to plug Claude into existing ecosystems without writing bespoke integration glue for every system. MCP is increasingly supported across the broader AI tooling landscape, making integrations portable.
Pay-as-you-go
Pay-as-you-go
Pay-as-you-go
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The platform now exposes the Claude 4 model family including Opus 4.6 (claude-opus-4-6), Sonnet 4.6 (claude-sonnet-4-6), and Haiku 4.5 (claude-haiku-4-5). New and beta capabilities include Claude Managed Agents with stateful sessions and persistent event history, Fast mode (beta research preview), adaptive thinking effort and task budgets (beta), an Advisor tool, programmatic tool calling, fine-grained tool streaming, context editing and compaction, a dedicated Claude API skill, remote MCP servers with an MCP connector, Microsoft Foundry as a new enterprise deployment target alongside AWS Bedrock and Google Cloud Vertex AI, and expanded Skills support (Overview, Quickstart, Best practices, Skills for enterprise, Skills in the API).
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