Anthropic is launching a new API that allows its Claude AI model to search on the web. The company said in a press release released Wednesday that developers using it can build applications powered by Claude to provide the latest information.

The launch of APIs is as AI companies seek to enhance their models in various ways that could attract new customers to their platforms. For its part, Anthropic made its debut last week, connecting the app to Claude and an extended "In-Dive" feature that makes Claude Search Enterprise accounts, websites and more.

“Now, developers can enhance their comprehensive knowledge of Claude by enabling web search tools when making a request to (our) API,” Anthropic wrote in its release. “With web search, developers can now build AI solutions that can leverage current information without managing their own web search infrastructure.”

When the Web Search API is enabled, Claude uses the "inference" feature to determine whether a given request will benefit from the latest information or expertise. If Claude decides to search the network, it will generate search queries, search results, analyze them and provide cited answers.

Claude can also use earlier results to understand subsequent queries. Developers can customize this behavior and specify domains that allow Claude and not search. Anthropic says developers can also allow or prohibit the use of web search at the organizational level.

Pricing starts at $10 per 1000 searches. Search for use with the human Claude 3.7 sonnet, the new Claude 3.5 sonnet and the Claude 3.5 Haiku model.

In related news, Anthropic brings web search into Claude code, a tool that allows developers to click on Claude to complete various coding tasks. With web search, Claude code provides access to current API documentation, technical articles, and other information about development tools and libraries.

As a research preview, the Claude code is still beta.

Updated Pacific at 4:16 pm: Pricing and model compatibility information were added.