anthropics/anthropic-cli

ant – Claude Platform CLI

What it is

ant is the official command‑line interface for Anthropic’s Claude Platform. It lets you call the Claude large‑language‑model API directly from your terminal.

Key capabilities

Message handling – send prompts, receive completions, and pipe results into other tools.
Resource management – list models, create and manage beta resources such as agents, sessions, and uploaded files.
Convenient auth – log in with your Claude Console account, use an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY env var, or pipe a secret from a manager (e.g., 1Password) via stdin.
Output shaping – extract fields with a jq‑style --transform flag and output raw text for scripting.
File uploads – embed images or other files in messages using the @path syntax.

Installation

Homebrew (macOS/Linux): brew install anthropics/tap/ant
From source (any platform): install Go 1.22+, then run go install 'github.com/anthropics/anthropic-cli/cmd/ant@latest'. The binary lands in $(go env GOPATH)/bin.

Getting started

Authenticate:

ant auth login
# or set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY with a key from the Claude Console

Send a simple prompt:

ant messages create \
  --model claude-opus-4-8 \
  --max-tokens 1024 \
  --message '{role: user, content: "Hello, Claude"}'

The CLI accepts relaxed JSON/YAML, so you don’t need to quote every key.

Typical command pattern

ant <resource>[:<subresource>] <command> [flags]

Why it matters

Provides a lightweight, script‑friendly way to integrate Claude into automation pipelines, CI jobs, or personal tooling without writing code.
Mirrors the full Claude API surface, so anything you can do via HTTP you can do from the terminal.

License

Further reading