anthropics/claude-cookbooks
OfficialA collection of notebooks/recipes showcasing some fun and effective ways of using Claude.
The most-starred official Claude API reference on GitHub with 37,627 stars -- Anthropic's own engineers maintain every notebook. Clone the repo, set your API key, and copy-paste production-ready patterns for RAG, tool use, vision, agents, and fine-tuning.
Best for
Our Review
Claude Cookbooks is Anthropic's official collection of 35+ Jupyter notebooks for real-world Claude API tasks -- 37,627 stars. Patterns stay tested and updated by Anthropic as models evolve.
What Claude Cookbooks covers:
- •Text classification ready-to-run notebooks for multi-class and sentiment tasks.
- •Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) full recipes with Pinecone, Wikipedia, and web sources.
- •Tool use and function calling customer service agents, calculators, SQL queries.
- •Multimodal vision image analysis, chart reading, form transcription, PDF handling.
- •Extended thinking reasoning patterns for complex tasks.
- •Finetuning notebooks to customize Claude models.
Integrations and ecosystem:
- •Pinecone vector database for production RAG.
- •Voyage AI embeddings for semantic search.
- •AWS infrastructure patterns for scaling.
- •Claude Agent SDK sub-agent examples with Haiku and Opus.
Getting started:
Clone with git clone https://github.com/anthropics/claude-cookbooks. Install Jupyter via pip install notebook. Set export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=your_key. Run jupyter notebook and open a fundamentals notebook.
Limitations:
No tagged releases -- relies on rolling commits. Needs local Python/Jupyter setup and API key. Separate hosted runner at platform.claude.com/cookbook.
Cons
- Requires Jupyter and Python environment setup -- no one-click runner in repo.
- Rolling updates via commits -- no versioned releases for pinning.
- Assumes basic coding and API key -- skips absolute non-coders.
- Some links reference old repo path from GitHub rename.
Our Verdict
Developers cut RAG or agent build time with Anthropic-tested notebooks that match 2026 Claude models like 3.7 Sonnet.
Vibe builders prototype fast via copy-paste fundamentals course -- no CS degree needed.
Skip if you want hosted no-code tools or avoid Jupyter entirely.
Anthropic's maintenance makes this the reliable pick over fading third-party guides.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Claude Cookbooks?
Claude Cookbooks is Anthropic's official repo of 35+ Jupyter notebooks for Claude API patterns. It covers tasks from text classification to multimodal agents. Examples include the RAG notebook using FAISS for retrieval and the tool use notebook for Python-executing agents. Clone from https://github.com/anthropics/anthropic-cookbook.
Is Claude Cookbooks free to use?
Yes. Claude Cookbooks uses the MIT license. Fork, modify, and run notebooks without cost. The repository contains Jupyter notebooks that demonstrate Claude's capabilities in areas like retrieval-augmented generation, function calling, and data analysis. Start by cloning the repo and running one locally.
How do I get started with Claude Cookbooks?
Clone the repo, install Jupyter with pip install jupyterlab, set your ANTHROPIC_API_KEY as an environment variable, and open any notebook. Start with the introduction notebook for a basic client.messages.create call. The tool-use and vision notebooks are good next steps after the basics.
What examples are in Claude Cookbooks?
Claude Cookbooks includes RAG with Pinecone, tool-calling agents, vision for charts and PDFs, fine-tuning, and code skills notebooks. The RAG notebook indexes documents in Pinecone and queries them via Claude for precise retrieval. Vision examples use prompts like "Extract sales figures from this PDF chart" to parse image data.
Claude Cookbooks vs LangChain examples?
Claude Cookbooks provides Anthropic-maintained, Claude-native patterns without abstractions. Recipes demonstrate direct Anthropic SDK calls, like defining "type": "function" tools in client.messages.create and parsing tool_calls in the response. Choose Claude Cookbooks for raw API speed in 2026, LangChain when switching LLMs often.
What is claude-cookbooks?
The most-starred official Claude API reference on GitHub with 37,627 stars -- Anthropic's own engineers maintain every notebook. Clone the repo, set your API key, and copy-paste production-ready patterns for RAG, tool use, vision, agents, and fine-tuning.
What license does claude-cookbooks use?
claude-cookbooks uses the MIT license.
What are alternatives to claude-cookbooks?
Explore related tools and alternatives on My AI Guide.
Great for: Pro Vibe Builders
Skip if: You need something more beginner-friendly or guided
Open source & community-verified
MIT licensed — free to use in any project, no strings attached. 41,050 developers have starred this, meaning the community has reviewed and trusted it.
Reviewed by My AI Guide for relevance, quality, and active maintenance before listing.
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