Intro to Claude
Claude is a highly performant, trustworthy, and intelligent AI platform built by Anthropic. Claude excels at tasks involving language, reasoning, analysis, coding, and more.
The latest generation of Claude models:
Claude Opus 4.7 - Anthropic's most capable model for complex reasoning and agentic coding, with a step-change jump over Claude Opus 4.6. Read the Claude Opus 4.7 announcement.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 - Frontier intelligence at scale, built for coding, agents, and enterprise workflows. Read the Claude Sonnet 4.6 announcement.
Claude Haiku 4.5 - Fastest model with near-frontier intelligence. Read the Claude Haiku 4.5 announcement.
Looking to chat with Claude? Visit claude.ai.
Anthropic offers two ways to build with Claude, each suited to different use cases:
| Messages API | Claude Managed Agents | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Direct model prompting access | Pre-built, configurable agent harness that runs in managed infrastructure |
| Best for | Custom agent loops and fine-grained control | Long-running tasks and asynchronous work |
| Learn more | Messages API docs | Claude Managed Agents docs |
Recommended path for new developers
Follow these steps to go from zero to a working Claude integration.
Make your first API call
Set up your environment, install an SDK, and send your first message to Claude.
Understand the Messages API
Learn the core request and response structure, including multi-turn conversations, system prompts, and stop reasons.
Choose the right model
Compare Claude models by capability and cost to pick the best fit for your use case.
Explore features and tools
Discover what Claude can do: extended thinking, web search, file handling, structured outputs, and more.
Develop with Claude
Anthropic provides developer tools to help you build and scale applications with Claude.
Prototype and test prompts in your browser with the Workbench and prompt generator.
Explore the full Claude API and client SDK documentation.
Learn with interactive Jupyter notebooks covering PDFs, embeddings, and more.
Key capabilities
Claude can assist with many tasks that involve text, code, and images.
Summarize text, answer questions, extract data, translate text, and explain and generate code.
Process and analyze visual input and generate text and code from images.