Introduction to the Anthropic Platform ↗
yesEditorial Notes
The gateway to the Anthropic platform. Read this to understand the landscape: what Claude models are available, what the API can do, and how the documentation is organized. Pay attention to the distinction between the Messages API (for building apps) and the platform features (prompt caching, batches, etc.) — understanding this split early will save confusion later.
Original Documentation
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 4.6 - Our most intelligent model, and the world’s best model for coding, enterprise agents, and professional work. Learn more.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 - Frontier intelligence at scale—built for coding, agents, and enterprise workflows. Learn more.
Claude Haiku 4.5 - Fastest model with near-frontier intelligence. Learn more.
Looking to chat with Claude? Visit claude.ai.
Recommended path for new developers#
Follow these steps to go from zero to a working Claude integration.
Set up your environment, install an SDK, and send your first message to Claude.
Go to the quickstart Learn the core request and response structure, including multi-turn conversations, system prompts, and stop reasons.
Read the Messages API guide Compare Claude models by capability and cost to pick the best fit for your use case.
See the models overview 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.
Support#
Find answers to frequently asked account and billing questions.
Check the status of Anthropic services.