What is Claude and the Anthropic API?

1. What is Claude and the Anthropic API?

Hello! Welcome to this video on Claude and the Anthropic API.

2. Discovering Claude

Let's start with a challenge. Imagine you receive dozens of lengthy customer feedback emails every day that need to be read, understood, and categorized so the right team can respond quickly.

3. Discovering Claude

With the Anthropic API, you can send those emails to Claude, give it clear instructions, and get back structured summaries that save time and improve response quality.

4. Claude in the LLM landscape

Claude is an AI assistant developed by Anthropic. It is designed with a strong emphasis on safety, accuracy, and handling long-form content. It stands alongside models like GPT, Gemini, and Llama, each bringing different strengths. Claude stands out in this competitive field because it uses Constitutional AI, a technique that teaches the model to follow built-in principles to stay helpful and safe. It can also handle large amounts of context, meaning it can reason over long conversations and documents provided as input.

5. Where Claude excels

Anthropic offers different variations of the Claude family of models. Each model variant serves different needs: Haiku offers speed for simple tasks, like tagging support tickets or summarizing tweets.

6. Where Claude excels

Sonnet balances speed with reasoning power, making it ideal for tasks like drafting emails or analyzing short reports.

7. Where Claude excels

And Opus delivers maximum capability for complex work, such as deep document analysis, legal review, or multi-step data extraction.

8. The Anthropic API

All Claude models can be accessed via the Anthropic API. An API, or Application Programming Interface, is a messenger that takes requests and tells a system what we want it to do, then returns the system's response to us.

9. The Anthropic API

The Anthropic API specifically bridges our code and Claude's capabilities. It enables three key features: multi-turn conversations through its chat, system prompts that give us precise control over Claude's behavior for different tasks, and finally, Claude's extended thinking mode, which allows the model to engage in deeper reasoning before responding to complex questions. Together, these features give us fine-grained control over Claude's capabilities, making it adaptable to a wide range of applications, whether we're building a chatbot, a study tool, or a business data assistant.

10. Let's try it out!

Let’s wrap up with an example. When talking to Claude, we don’t need any special formatting— we can think of it just like a smart, conversational partner. If we keep our prompt clear and focused, Claude will usually respond in a helpful and safe way. For example, we might ask it to compare models, simplify a paragraph, or generate structured data like JSON. These are simple but powerful ways to engage. Now, take a moment to think about a prompt you would write. What would you ask Claude to do?

11. Let's practice!

Let's practice with some exercises!

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