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Get an Anthropic API key

Anthropic's Claude family — Haiku, Sonnet, Opus — is often the strongest choice for brand-tone-sensitive ad copy. The API requires billing (no free tier) but Haiku is cents per generation. In our experience Anthropic is the most reliable of the three providers, making it a great failover.

1. Create an Anthropic account

  1. Go to console.anthropic.com.
  2. Sign up with email or Google.
  3. Verify your email (Anthropic sends a confirmation link).

After verification you land on the Anthropic Console — the developer dashboard for the Claude API.

2. Set up billing

Anthropic doesn't have a free tier. You need to add billing before any API calls work.

  1. In the left nav, click Billing (or Plans & billing depending on UI version).
  2. Click Add payment method.
  3. Add a credit card.
  4. Anthropic typically requires a minimum $5 prepaid credit purchase to activate API access. Add the minimum.

That $5 lasts a long time for ad-gen. Claude Haiku is roughly $0.25 per million input tokens and $1.25 per million output tokens. A typical ad generation is well under 1k tokens — call it a fraction of a cent per ad.

3. Create the API key

  1. In the left nav, click API keys (or go directly to console.anthropic.com/settings/keys).
  2. Click Create Key.
  3. Give it a name like trafficloopback so you can identify it later.
  4. Optionally set a workspace, spend limit, or rate-limit cap. Spend limits are nice for safety — start with $10/month.
  5. Click Create Key.
  6. Copy the key immediately. Anthropic shows it once. If you lose it you have to delete and recreate.

Security: the key starts with sk-ant-... and is fully equivalent to your billing credentials. Don't paste it into chat, screenshots, or git. TrafficLoopback stores it encrypted in our database.

4. Add it to TrafficLoopback

  1. Sign in at trafficloopback.com/login.
  2. Go to Settings → API keys.
  3. Click Add key and pick Anthropic.
  4. Paste the key. Label it (e.g. Main) and set a priority.
  5. Save.

5. Why Anthropic as failover

If you're running Google or OpenAI as primary, Anthropic is the best secondary choice we've found:

  • Reliability — Anthropic has had fewer outages than the other two in 2025–2026.
  • Different safety filter — content Google or OpenAI reject (regulated industries, sensitive subjects) often passes Anthropic's checks fine.
  • Brand voice — Claude tends to write more naturally in a specific tone, which matters for ad copy.

Pair Anthropic with at least one of:

See Why multiple AI keys for the failover mechanics.