Use Claude Cowork with Any Inference Provider!

So in big news today, Anthropic has released information about how to set up third party uh inference providers with Claude Co-Work or Claude Desktop, the Claude Desktop application. Uh, the way to get to this is a little bit convoluted, and that's okay because that's kind of the point. So you'll go to Claude Desktop, um, and here's how you're gonna get to it. You go to the help menu, go to the troubleshooting menu, go to enable developer mode. Once you do that, say yes, it's okay.

Uh for this to be totally unsafe. Uh it will it will yell at you. And then once you have that in place, let's bring Claude back here. There's a developer menu up top. And here is where it says configure third party inference.

This is where you can put in any API that speaks the anthropic uh language. So um whatever it um provider. So let's take a look here. Um you have the gateway base URL and the gateway API key. Now, if an endpoint, if if a provider uh has any kind of um uh inference uh that speaks the anthropic uh dialect, it will work here.

So I'm gonna put in LM Studio uh and put in the LM Studio API key, which is just it doesn't really matter what it is. And we're gonna hit apply locally. You can see there's other providers like Vertex Foundry. So if you have this is interesting, if you are a Google Cloud Shop and you have Gemini and you're paying for Gemini through Vertex, you could use it inside of Claude Cowork. I'm gonna hit apply locally.

I'm gonna say relaunch now, and now Claude should have the ability to speak to my um third party inference provider. So let's just double check to make sure that it's set up properly. I've got the gateway there. And let's see if this will work. We'll give it a prompt.

It is still pulling from Anthropics API. I could tell because it's not showing up in my LM Studio console. So let's see what's up with this. Okay. So I could not get it to work with LM Studio, but I did get it to work with Minimax.

Uh Minimax is the Singapore provider. You can see the model has changed here to legacy model. So I'm in co-work. Now let's give this a try. We'll give it a prompt.

We're gonna see what happens. And I'm gonna check while this is running. I'm gonna go to my Mini Max token plan, uh, which started out at two uses in my current usage here. And if this works, okay, let's take a look. Yep, there's that.

Now let's refresh my token plan. Five. So it did, it worked. It because I have nothing else running on Minimax right now. It Claude Cowork called the Minimax API to use their model as the inference model for Claude Coork.

So for this is a really big deal. For anyone who is saying, like, yeah, Claude Cowork is awesome, but anthropic subscriptions are stupid expensive, which they are, but not compared to like you know uh uh you know, like a consultant's fees. Um but this is super super valuable because you can now have it use the inference provider of your choice, and as long as the underlying model is smart, it will work, but you'll benefit from the clawed co-work ecosystem, which means that you don't have to install something like open work at it or whatever. This is the way to flip that around. So very, very cool.

Obviously, this is an enterprise play, um, but you can apply it locally with no coding. You just change the settings and you're up and running. I'm going to play around more to see if I can get to work with LM Studio, but for sure you can use other cloud inference providers, which can be a very big cost savings when you're using uh Anthrope. So that's uh that's what we just found. Hope you enjoyed it.

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