The Anthropic API provides programmatic access to Claude, Anthropic's family of advanced large language models, enabling developers to integrate state-of-the-art AI capabilities into applications. Available through direct API access, AWS Bedrock, and Google Vertex AI, the API supports text generation, vision, function calling, streaming responses, and agentic workflows. As of 2026, Claude models offer context windows up to 1 million tokens, sophisticated reasoning modes, and production-ready features like prompt caching and batch processing that can reduce costs by up to 90%. The API follows a stateless message-based architecture where developers send complete conversation histories with each request, making context management and conversation flow explicit and predictable.

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