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Models and Providers

Claude Code has a built-in list of 22 models. It also knows the model names of each cloud provider, and a set of short aliases such as opus. You choose a model with a flag, an environment variable, a setting, or the /model command. For example, run claude --model opus. Or set ANTHROPIC_MODEL, ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_*_MODEL, or the model and modelOverrides settings. Pick a provider with CLAUDE_CODE_USE_BEDROCK and its siblings. Limit choices with availableModels. Settings live in ~/.claude/settings.json (user), .claude/settings.json (project), managed settings, and your shell environment. The pages below list every model, alias, and provider switch. To see how Claude Code makes the choice at run time, read Models.

Pages in This Section​

PageWhat it holds
Model Catalog, Aliases, and PricingHow to choose a model, the aliases, the catalog, other model IDs, pricing, and capability flags.
Effort, Thinking, and FallbackThe effort levels, the thinking controls, fallback models, retries, and automatic switches.
Providers and GatewaysThe provider switches, endpoint and region variables, provider model names, Vertex regions, and gateways.

Example​

Pin Opus and Sonnet on Amazon Bedrock. Then start Claude Code on a 1M window of Opus.

export CLAUDE_CODE_USE_BEDROCK=1
export AWS_REGION=us-east-1
export ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL='us.anthropic.claude-opus-4-8'
export ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL='us.anthropic.claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929-v1:0'
claude --model opus[1m] --effort high

Limit what users can pick in managed settings:

managed-settings.json
{
  "availableModels": ["sonnet", "claude-opus-4-8"],
  "modelOverrides": {
    "claude-opus-4-8": "arn:aws:bedrock:us-east-2:123456789012:application-inference-profile/opus-prod"
  }
}