Build with Claude AI

Choose Claude when you need longer context windows (200K tokens for full documents), built-in safety for customer-facing apps, or nuanced handling of sensitive topics. Claude excels at following complex instructions precisely and is less likely to refuse reasonable requests due to overly cautious content filters.

Constitutional AI is Anthropic's approach to training AI to be helpful, harmless, and honest. It uses a set of principles (the 'constitution') to guide the model's behavior, reducing harmful outputs without heavy-handed content blocking. This makes Claude ideal for enterprise use where reliability and safety are critical.

Claude 3 models (Haiku, Sonnet, Opus) all support vision capabilities. You can send images alongside text for document analysis, chart interpretation, screenshot understanding, and more. However, Claude cannot generate images—only analyze them.

Claude can process up to 200,000 tokens (~150,000 words or 500 pages) in a single prompt. This allows you to feed entire codebases, legal contracts, or research papers without chunking. The model maintains coherence across the full context, making it ideal for document Q&A and summarization.

Anthropic uses a tier system based on spend. New accounts start with lower limits (~40K tokens/minute) and increase to millions of tokens per minute at higher tiers. Enterprise agreements can customize limits. The API also supports graceful rate limit handling with retry-after headers.

Claude may occasionally refuse requests it perceives as harmful. To handle this: provide clear context about legitimate use, use system prompts to establish appropriate framing, and leverage Anthropic's 'harmlessness' adjustments. For enterprise accounts, Anthropic can customize safety thresholds.

For most production use cases, Claude 3.5 Sonnet offers the best balance of capability and cost. Use Haiku for high-volume, latency-sensitive tasks like classification. Reserve Opus for the most complex reasoning tasks where quality outweighs cost considerations.

Anthropic does not currently offer public fine-tuning for Claude. However, Claude responds extremely well to prompt engineering and few-shot examples. For specialized use cases, RAG systems combined with careful system prompts often outperform fine-tuned models.

Claude excels at structured output. Specify the exact format in your prompt, provide an example, and optionally use XML tags to structure your requests. Claude reliably outputs valid JSON for API integrations. For stricter parsing, consider using Anthropic's tool use feature.

Anthropic is SOC 2 Type II certified. Claude API traffic is encrypted in transit (TLS 1.2+), and Anthropic does not train on API inputs by default. For highly regulated industries, Anthropic offers enterprise agreements with additional compliance provisions including HIPAA BAAs.

Claude supports 'tool use' for function calling. Define tools as JSON schemas, and Claude will output structured requests when appropriate. Unlike some models, Claude is particularly good at deciding when NOT to call a tool and can explain its reasoning, reducing unnecessary function calls.

Haiku is fastest (typically 100-300ms to first token), Sonnet is mid-range (300-800ms), and Opus is slowest (800ms-2s). For streaming applications, all models begin streaming within these windows. Actual response time depends on output length.