How to get your Anthropic API key (3 steps)

Anthropic, an AI safety and research company, offers a family of AI models (dubbed “Claude”) that can help your team analyze and interpret large sets of data, streamline tedious recruiting processes, troubleshoot customer issues, and much more.

That said, you can get even more value from Anthropic by integrating its models with your internal applications or your product. Once you have, you can build intelligent workflows that can fundamentally transform how your teams or clients carry out their day-to-day work.

As a first step to building these integrations, you’ll need to access your Anthropic API key. We’ll help you do just that below!

Step 1: Create an account

Sign up for an account here.

Related: How to get your ChatGPT API key

Step 2: Generate an API Key 

After creating an account, click your Profile in the top right corner and select API Keys

On the next screen, click Create Key and type in a name for your key. Hit Create Key after naming your key.

IMPORTANT: Copy your key and store it in a safe location. You won’t be able to re-access the key in the future.

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Step 3: Set up billing

From the same screen in Step 2, select Plans & Billing in the left navigation.

On this screen, you have 2 options:

• If you recently created a new account, you may have credits to test the API without setting up a paid plan. To claim the credits, you’ll need to provide your phone number. If you go this route, you can skip the remainder of this guide.
• If you don’t have credits, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan. You can see information about plans if you hit Select Plan.

Here’s an overview of the plans:

If you select the Scale plan, you’ll be prompted to talk to Anthropic’s sales team and the rest of this guide won’t apply. For this guide, we’ll continue with the Build plan.

After continuing in the flow by selecting Build, you’ll be prompted to enter a credit card and purchase an initial amount of credits. You can also set up an auto-reload of credits on this page.

After hitting Purchase Credits, you’ll be taken to a dashboard, which you can use to manage your usage and billing going forward.

Related: A guide to creating API tokens in Llama

Other key considerations for building to Anthropic’s API

Before building to Anthropic’s API, it’s worth familiarizing yourself with the following.

Pricing

Anthropic currently prices their API usage with a prepaid credit system. Depending on your usage of the API, you may utilize a different number of credits per call. To get the latest information you can see their docs here.

Rate limits

Anthropic’s rate limit depends on your usage tier and is currently measured in requests per minute, tokens per minute, and tokens per day. If you exceed any of the rate limits you will get a 429 error—“Your account has hit a rate limit."

More information on usage tiers and rate limits can be found here. 

Errors to look out for

Anthropic does a great job of listing all of the possible error codes you can encounter while using their API. Learn more here.

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