Use ScaledThought with Claude Code

ScaledThought serves OpenAI-compatible endpoints (/v1/chat/completions, /v1/responses) for the code Claude Code writes and runs: your app, scripts, batch jobs and evals. It also accepts Anthropic Messages API requests (/v1/messages), so you can point Claude Code itself at ScaledThought's open-weight models with ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL. Those answers come from ScaledThought's models, not Claude.

Paste the prompt above into your coding agent, or run the command yourself in your project's directory. It creates the account, writes ST_API_KEY and ST_BASE_URL to ./.env (mode 0600) and adds .env to .gitignore. Only the US region is open; Canada is coming soon.

npx -y scaledthought@0.3 init --region us --source org-claude-code

Usage is prepaid, so a new account answers 402 insufficient_credits until its first top-up. This prints a payment link and opens it in your browser; nothing is charged until you pay on it. How prepaid credits work

npx -y scaledthought@0.3 billing topup --amount-usd 20
npx -y scaledthought@0.3 billing wait

Paste the prompt above into Claude Code in your project's directory. It reads /llms.txt, the setup protocol written for agents, and runs npx -y scaledthought@0.3 init --region us. The key goes to ./.env as ST_API_KEY (mode 0600, git-ignored) and is never printed.

For account tools inside Claude Code (usage, keys, budgets, billing), ask it to run npx -y scaledthought@0.3 mcp, which prints the exact command for your region. Run it in a shell where ST_API_KEY is loaded, because the shell expands it. The MCP server can't create accounts and doesn't serve inference: that stays on the API.

set -a; . ./.env; set +a   # load ST_API_KEY
claude mcp add --transport http scaledthought https://api.us.scaledthought.com/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer $ST_API_KEY"

To run Claude Code on ScaledThought's open-weight models instead of Claude, start it with these variables. Requests it sends under a Claude model name are answered by a ScaledThought model, and Anthropic's server tools, such as web search, are not available. npx -y scaledthought@0.3 models --live lists every model live in your region; the examples use deepseek-v4-1-flash.

set -a; . ./.env; set +a  # puts ST_API_KEY in the environment
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://api.us.scaledthought.com  # your region's host, without /v1
export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN="$ST_API_KEY"
export ANTHROPIC_MODEL=deepseek-v4-1-flash  # or a model id from `npx -y scaledthought@0.3 models --live`
export ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL=deepseek-v4-1-flash  # Claude Code's small background tasks
claude

The setup protocol ends by asking Claude Code to look through your project (read-only, on your machine) for model calls and bulk jobs, and to give you a table of what could move and which live model could serve it. It changes code only after you pick.

• Each place that runs code can get its own sub-agent key with a daily budget: npx -y scaledthought@0.3 keys put github --repo <owner/repo> --budget-usd 2 stores it as a GitHub Actions secret through gh, never printed.

• Claude Code MCP docs, read 2026-10-13.
• Claude Code model configuration, read 2026-10-13.
• Anthropic web search tool, read 2026-10-13.
• ScaledThought: /llms.txt (the setup protocol) and the docs.