Is this included in the free AI tier for small developers? Big news if so

From app developer standpoint why would anyone ship claude keys like that ... or am I missing something? From consumer standpoint - I guess they can use their own keys but it is not something that is very user friendly as you can imagine.

Since Claude is technically a subscription, Apple will slowly weasel their way into skimming 30% of the token spend

I think Apple has a fairly good plan for supplying a common API and default on device models.

What confuses me about this article is: The code examples Python, Ruby, etc.) look to me like the original Anthropic APIs, not Apple’s abstraction. Did I miss something?

Shared daemon is the only way this makes sense on-device. A 3B model at 4-bit is roughly 2GB - three apps loading their own copies would eat an 8GB phone.

the github repo: https://github.com/anthropics/ClaudeForFoundationModels

I’m surprised to see the model names hardcoded as an enum (e.g. `.sonnet4_6`), instead of a string with model discovery so that the user can select their preferred model without having to get a new app version through the App Store to support newer models.

This seems smart. Apple, despite not really leading in AI themselves, are right on the hot path of where developers are going to yolo slop into the ecosystem. Make a tonne of sense to define a nice clean API that places like Anthropic can build on top of and expose to developers.

It's also smart for them to make sure the billing is going direct from Anthropic to the developer. The initial thought is "That means Apple's not taking a cut", but from the other side of it, developers who use this API are going to have to expose that cost to customers somehow, and that translates to subscription/InAppPurchase etc. on top of which Apple will get it's 30%.

So where does the api key reside? You can’t ship it on the iOS client since anyone can read and abuse it

> Usage is billed to your Anthropic account at standard API pricing.

While expected, it’s still a bummer.