What does it do?
This is the official Python library for sending requests to Anthropic’s Claude models directly from your own code, the same way the OpenAI library connects to ChatGPT. You write a short snippet specifying a prompt and some settings, and the library handles sending it to Anthropic’s servers and returning Claude’s response. It supports more advanced features too, like giving Claude access to tools it can call, or streaming a response back word by word as it’s generated, similar to watching ChatGPT type in real time. For developers, it’s the standard front door into building anything on top of Claude.
See it in action
This code sends a question to Anthropic’s Claude AI model over the internet and prints back the answer it generates.
import anthropic
client = anthropic.Anthropic(api_key="your_api_key_here")
message = client.messages.create(
model="claude-3-5-sonnet-20241022",
max_tokens=100,
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Say hello in French."}]
)
print(message.content[0].text)Why would a non-developer care?
Every product that advertises being built with Claude, coding assistants, writing tools, customer service bots, passes through a library like this one to actually reach Anthropic’s models. It matters to non-developers mainly because it’s part of the invisible plumbing behind AI features they increasingly interact with daily, from Claude.ai itself to third-party apps built on the Claude API.
Real-world examples
Companies building on Claude, including coding tools and enterprise assistants, use this library as their connection point to Anthropic’s models. This same pattern, a small official library standing between a company’s app and a powerful AI model, repeats across essentially every major AI provider today.
Who uses it
Developers building products or internal tools on top of Anthropic’s Claude models.
How it compares to alternatives
It mirrors the OpenAI Python library closely in design and purpose, just pointed at a different company’s models; the two are frequently used almost interchangeably in code that supports switching between AI providers.