Connect to Anthropic Claude

Anthropic provides access to Claude models through an API. This guide shows how to route traffic to Anthropic through API7 Gateway using the ai-proxy plugin.

Prerequisites

• Install Docker.

• Install cURL to send requests to the services for validation.

• Have a running API7 Enterprise Gateway instance.

• Obtain the Admin API key. Save it to an environment variable:

  export ADMIN_API_KEY=your-admin-api-key   # replace with your API key

• Obtain the ID of the service you want to configure. Save it to an environment variable:

  export SERVICE_ID=your-service-id         # replace with your service ID

Obtain an Anthropic API Key

Create an account and API key by following the Anthropic API documentation. Save the key to an environment variable:

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx   # replace with your API key

Configure the AI Proxy for Anthropic

Create a route with the ai-proxy plugin:

Admin API

curl "http://127.0.0.1:7080/apisix/admin/routes?gateway_group_id=default" -X PUT \
  -H "X-API-KEY: $ADMIN_API_KEY" \
  -d '{
  "id": "anthropic-route",
  "service_id": "$SERVICE_ID",
  "paths": ["/anthropic"],
  "plugins": {
    "ai-proxy": {
      "provider": "anthropic",
      "auth": {
        "header": {
          "Authorization": "Bearer '"$ANTHROPIC_API_KEY"'"
        }
      },
      "options": {
        "model": "claude-sonnet-4-20250514"
      }
    }
  }
}'

❶ Set the provider to anthropic.

❷ Attach the Anthropic API key using the Authorization header.

❸ Set the model to claude-sonnet-4-20250514. See the Anthropic models page for available models.

ADC

adc.yaml

services:
  - name: Anthropic Service
    routes:
      - uris:
          - /anthropic
        name: anthropic-route
        plugins:
          ai-proxy:
            provider: anthropic
            auth:
              header:
                Authorization: "Bearer sk-ant-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
            options:
              model: claude-sonnet-4-20250514

❶ Set the provider to anthropic.

❷ Attach the Anthropic API key using the Authorization header.

❸ Set the model to claude-sonnet-4-20250514. See the Anthropic models page for available models.

Synchronize the configuration to API7 Gateway:

adc sync -f adc.yaml

Validate the Configuration

Send a chat completion request:

curl "http://127.0.0.1:9080/anthropic" -X POST \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "messages": [
      { "role": "user", "content": "What is the capital of France?" }
    ]
  }'

You should receive a response similar to the following:

{
  "id": "msg_01abc123",
  "object": "chat.completion",
  "model": "claude-sonnet-4-20250514",
  "choices": [
    {
      "index": 0,
      "message": {
        "role": "assistant",
        "content": "The capital of France is Paris."
      },
      "finish_reason": "stop"
    }
  ],
  "usage": {
    "prompt_tokens": 12,
    "completion_tokens": 8,
    "total_tokens": 20
  }
}

note

API7 Gateway normalizes all LLM responses to the OpenAI chat completion format, regardless of the backend provider. Clients always receive a consistent response structure. To use native Anthropic protocol, see Protocol Conversion.

To enable streaming responses, set "stream": true in the request body. Use the proxy-buffering plugin to disable NGINX proxy_buffering to avoid server-sent events (SSE) being buffered.

Next Steps

You have learned how to route traffic to Anthropic through API7 Gateway. See the Anthropic API documentation and Models pages for more details.

• Protocol Conversion — Use native Anthropic protocol with any backend provider, or route Anthropic requests to OpenAI.
• Multi-LLM Routing and Fallback — Combine Anthropic with other providers for failover.