How to Use Claude AI API?

Claude AI is an artificial intelligence assistant created by Anthropic that is designed to be helpful, harmless, and honest. It provides an API (Application Programming Interface) that allows developers to integrate Claude’s advanced language capabilities into their own applications and websites.

The Claude AI API enables you to send text prompts to Claude AI and receive intelligent responses. It supports features like complex question answering, language translation, text summarization, open-ended dialog, and more. The API was built with safety and ethics in mind from the ground up.

In this comprehensive guide, we will go through everything you need to know to get started with the Claude AI API:

Signing Up and Getting API Keys

The first step is to sign up on the Claude AI developer portal to get your secret API keys. Here’s what to do:

• Go to the Claude API Developer dashboard and sign up for a free account. You will need to provide basic information like your name, email, and company details.
• Once your account is created, you can find your unique API keys on the dashboard. This includes a Client ID and Client Secret which will authenticate your API requests.
• Your Client ID identifies your specific application. The Client Secret should be kept private like a password. Make sure not to share these keys publicly.
• You have the option to generate keys for testing purposes which have lower usage limits. And you can create production keys once you’re ready to launch your application.
• The dashboard also shows usage analytics, billing details, and lets you enable/disable keys. Manage all your keys carefully from your dashboard.

Setting up the API Client & Making Requests

Now that you have API keys, you can start making requests to the Claude API from your application.

Choosing a Library

Claude AI provides official API Client Libraries in Python, JavaScript, Java, and more languages to come which make integration easy.

Here are examples using the Python client library:

# Install the Claude Python package
pip install claude-python

import claude

# Set up a client with your API key
client = claude.ClaudeClient(client_id=<YOUR-CLIENT-ID>, 
                         client_secret=<YOUR-CLIENT-SECRET>)

# Call the create completion endpoint                        
response = client.create_completion(...)

# Handle the response
print(response["choices"][0]["text"])

The client library handles authentication, serialization, and calling the Claude API endpoints for you.

Calling the API with HTTP

You can also directly make HTTP requests to the Claude API without using a client library. Useful if your programming language does not have an official Claude AI library yet.

Here is an example API call using curl:

curl https://api.anthropic.com/v1/completions 
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR-API-KEY'
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' 
  -d '{
        ""prompt": "What is the capital of France",
        "max_tokens": 10
       }'

This makes a POST request to the /completions endpoint by passing your secret key in the Authorization header along with the prompt text and other parameters.

The benefit of the client library is it handles the access token for you automatically. But HTTP requests give you full control.

Core API Endpoints

The Claude API has two core endpoints for most language processing tasks:

1. Completions Endpoint

The /completions endpoint is the primary way to get Claude to generate text continuations from a given prompt. Key options:

• prompt – The text you provide as input context
• max_tokens – The maximum length of text you want back from Claude
• temperature – Controls randomness/creativity from 0 to 1

You pass input text to the prompt parameter, and Claude will continue where you left off, up to the length you specify in max_tokens.

Use this endpoint for features like:

• Question Answering
• Dialog Systems
• Text Summarization
• Creative Writing
• Any application needing generative text

2. Embeds Endpoint

The /embeds endpoint has Claude analyze your input text and extract high-level embeddings about its semantic meaning, without generating textual continuations.

Key options:

• input – Text content you want Claude to analyze
• model – The embed model to use (options like text-embed-ada-002)

The response will include vector embeddings describing the content, attributes, and semantics of the text.

Uses include:

• Semantic Search
• Text Classification
• Content Moderation
• Recommendation Systems
• Any need for understanding text meaning

So in summary, use completions to generate text, and embeds to understand text meaning.

Authentication

All requests to the Claude API must be authenticated using an access token tied to your account’s client credentials.

As seen in the code examples above, the client libraries handle tokens for you automatically.

But at the HTTP level, you need to pass your API key via the Authorization header:

Authorization: Bearer YOUR-API-KEY

• Your API keys carry powerful permissions, so keep them secure.
• For production systems, make sure to use your restricted production keys, not the testing keys.

API Usage Limits

Usage limits apply based on the type of API key:

• Test keys – 1,000 Requests per day
• Paid keys – Up to 1 million+ Requests per day based on your pricing plan

The dashboard shows usage analytics to track requests against limits in real-time.

If you exceed the limits, you will get error responses like 429 Too Many Requests. Upgrade your account if you need higher production volume.

Code Samples

Here are some quick code snippets for common use cases when calling the Claude API:

Question Answering

prompt = "What is the largest country in the world by land area?"
response = client.create_completion(
  prompt=prompt, 
  max_tokens=100
)
print(response["choices"][0]["text"]) 
# Russia is the largest country in the world by total land area. At over 17 million 
# square kilometers, it accounts for more than 10% of the world's landmass.

Claude excels at factual questions across topics like geography, science, history and more.

Dialog Systems

history = []

while True:
  user_input = input("You: ")
  history.append("You: " + user_input)
  
  prompt = "\n".join(history[-3:])

  response = client.create_completion(
    prompt=prompt,  
    max_tokens=100
  )

  claude_output = response["choices"][0]["text"] 
  history.append("Claude: " + claude_output)

  print("Claude: ", claude_output)

You can have multi-turn conversations with context and personality by tracking prompt history.

Text Summarization

article = "..." # Long text content

prompt = f"Summarize this article in 5 bullet points:\n\n{article}"

summary = client.create_completion(
  prompt=prompt,
  max_tokens=100,
)["choices"][0]["text"] 

print(summary)

Claude can digest long content and summarize the key takeaways in just a few bullet points.

Content Moderation

text_to_analyze = "Some problematic text content..." 

embed = client.create_embedding(
  input=text_to_analyze,
  model="toxicity-embed"  
)

# embed will contain toxicity scores from 0 to 1
# Filter if above a threshold 
if embed["toxicity"] > 0.7:
  print("Possible toxic content detected")

Use Claude’s toxicity and hate speech models to detect risky content.

Translation

prompt = "Translate this paragraph to Spanish:..."

response = client.create_completion(
   prompt=prompt,
   max_tokens=500,
)

print(response["choices"][0]["text"])

Claude supports high-quality translation between English and 100+ languages.

So in summary, these show just some of the wide range of applications unlocked by Claude API access. The possibilities are endless!

Advanced Features

Beyond the basics, Claude provides cutting-edge AI capabilities through additional parameters and endpoints.

Models

Under the hood, different Claude models power different capabilities:

• Claude GPT – The generalist model for broad language tasks
• Claude DaVinci – More advanced specialist model focused on accuracy
• Claude Curie – Optimized for dialog applications
• Claude Expert – Emerging models for niche domains

You can select which model to use for both completions and embeddings via the model parameter.

Here is a conclusion to summarize the key points about using the Claude AI API:

Conclusion

The Claude AI API opens up powerful artificial intelligence capabilities through an easy-to-use web interface.

We covered the essentials of getting started from signing up for API keys to making your first API calls using the Python client library or HTTP requests. Claude’s core completions and embeddings endpoints enable diverse AI applications from question answering to dialog systems, semantic search, content moderation, and more.

Some key takeaways are:

• Claude AI provides advanced natural language understanding through its completions and embeddings APIs.
• By generating text continuations or extracting semantic embeddings, Claude enables intelligent features to be incorporated into any software application.
• The API has robust authentication mechanisms and usage limits in place to ensure ethical access.
• A range of models like Claude GPT, Claude DaVinci, Claude Curie cater to different accuracy, speed and safety needs.
• The documentation contains code samples for question answering, translation, summarization and other common use cases to build on top of.

So in summary, the Claude API is the easiest way to imbue your applications with the next generation of artificial intelligence in a secure and responsible way. The possibilities are endless, so sign up and start integrating today!

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