Using Claude Code with AI-VERDE¶

Claude Code is Anthropic's official CLI coding assistant. AI-VERDE can serve as the backend for Claude Code, routing requests through AI-VERDE's budget controls and guardrails to Anthropic Claude models hosted on AWS Bedrock.

Tip

If your course or team's Claude models are hosted on AWS Bedrock, we recommend using this Bedrock-style setup with Claude Code rather than the Anthropic-style setup. Ask your instructor or team lead if you're unsure where your models are hosted.

Note

Unlike the non-Bedrock Claude Code setup, which uses ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, the Bedrock setup must put your AI-VERDE API key in ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN. When talking to a Bedrock endpoint, Claude Code only sends ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN; an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY would be ignored.

Prerequisites¶

Obtain your AI-VERDE API key and note the AI-VERDE base URL. The base URL used in the environment variables ends in /bedrock rather than /v1. Instructions can be found here.
Note the Claude model ID for Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku. Instructions for listing available models can be found here. Model names in AI-VERDE are prefixed with an identifier for your course or team, separated by a dash or a slash (e.g. my-team-claude-sonnet-5 or my-team/claude-sonnet-5).
Install Claude Code. Instructions can be found at https://code.claude.com/docs/en/setup.
The remaining instructions assume a terminal on macOS or Linux with bash and Claude Code installed. On Windows, Option 1 below works the same way, with the file at %USERPROFILE%\.claude\settings.json.

1. Configure Claude Code¶

Option 1: `~/.claude/settings.json` (recommended)¶

Add the following env section to ~/.claude/settings.json (create the file if it does not exist). Settings in this file apply every time you run Claude Code, in any terminal.

{
  "env": {
    "ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN": "<your-ai-verde-api-key>",
    "ANTHROPIC_BEDROCK_BASE_URL": "https://llm-api.cyverse.ai/bedrock",
    "CLAUDE_CODE_SKIP_BEDROCK_AUTH": "1",
    "CLAUDE_CODE_USE_BEDROCK": "1",
    "ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL": "<model name for opus>",
    "ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL": "<model name for sonnet>",
    "ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL": "<model name for haiku>"
  }
}

For example:

{
  "env": {
    "ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN": "sk-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
    "ANTHROPIC_BEDROCK_BASE_URL": "https://llm-api.cyverse.ai/bedrock",
    "CLAUDE_CODE_SKIP_BEDROCK_AUTH": "1",
    "CLAUDE_CODE_USE_BEDROCK": "1",
    "ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL": "my-team-claude-opus-5",
    "ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL": "my-team-claude-sonnet-5",
    "ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL": "my-team-claude-haiku-4-5"
  }
}

If the file already has other settings, add the env section alongside them rather than replacing the file.

Warning

~/.claude/settings.json holds your API key. Keep the key in this user-level file, not in a project's .claude/settings.json, and don't commit or share it.

Option 2: Shell environment variables¶

Alternatively, export the same variables in your terminal before launching Claude Code:

export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN="<your-ai-verde-api-key>"
export ANTHROPIC_BEDROCK_BASE_URL=https://llm-api.cyverse.ai/bedrock
export CLAUDE_CODE_SKIP_BEDROCK_AUTH=1
export CLAUDE_CODE_USE_BEDROCK=1
export ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL="<model name for opus>"
export ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL="<model name for sonnet>"
export ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL="<model name for haiku>"

Exported variables only last for the current terminal session. To avoid re-entering them each session, add the lines to your shell profile (e.g. ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc), then source your shell profile.

Note

To obtain the AI-VERDE Bedrock Base URL, simply substitute /v1 with /bedrock, e.g. https://llm-api.cyverse.ai/v1 to https://llm-api.cyverse.ai/bedrock. If both ~/.claude/settings.json and your shell set the same variable, the value in ~/.claude/settings.json is used.

2. Launch Claude Code¶

Start Claude Code:

claude

You can run /status inside Claude Code to confirm it is using Amazon Bedrock with the AI-VERDE base URL.

If you need to change your API Key¶

If for some reason you need to change your AI-VERDE API key, update ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN wherever you set it in step 1 (~/.claude/settings.json or your shell profile), then restart Claude Code.