# Adding claude reasoning/thinking controls to the agent/responses api

**URL:** <https://community.perplexity.ai/t/adding-claude-reasoning-thinking-controls-to-the-agent-responses-api/6260>\
**Category:** Feature Requests\
**Tags:** agent-api, api\
**Created:** [October 2, 2026, 8:04am UTC](https://community.perplexity.ai/t/adding-claude-reasoning-thinking-controls-to-the-agent-responses-api/6260 "2026-10-02T08:04:39Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Jera\_Ran](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex001/user_avatar/community.perplexity.ai/jera_ran/32/3641_2.png) [@Jera\_Ran](https://community.perplexity.ai/u/Jera_Ran)\
**Post date:** [October 2, 2026, 8:04am UTC](https://community.perplexity.ai/t/adding-claude-reasoning-thinking-controls-to-the-agent-responses-api/6260/1 "2026-10-02T08:04:39Z")

</div>

### Pre-flight checklist

- This is a Perplexity API feature request, not a Perplexity app, Comet, or web UI request.
- I have checked whether this already exists in the docs or another forum topic.
- I have described the developer workflow or API use case this would improve.

### Feature type

- New endpoint or API capability
- New model, preset, or model behavior
- New parameter or request option
- New response field or metadata
- SDK improvement
- Dashboard, API key, or auth improvement
- Billing, credits, rate limit, or usage reporting improvement
- Docs or examples improvement
- Other API improvement

### Affected API area

- Agent API
- Search API
- Sonar API
- Embeddings API
- SDKs
- Dashboard, API keys, or auth
- Billing or credits
- Not sure

### Summary

Add support for Anthropic Claude models in the Agent API, including reasoning controls (effort/budget) and thinking summaries in the response.

### Problem

Claude models support extended thinking, but there’s currently no way to control it or see what it produced when going through Perplexity. Developers can’t set how much reasoning a request should use, so they can’t trade off latency and cost against answer quality per request. There’s also no way to get a summary of the model’s reasoning back, which makes it hard to debug, audit, or show users how an answer was reached.

### Proposed API behavior

1. **Claude model compatibility** : allow Claude models to be selected in the Agent/Responses API with the same request/response shape as other supported models.
2. **Reasoning control** : a request option to set reasoning effort and/or a thinking token budget (for the models that still support it), e.g. `reasoning.effort` (`low` | `medium` | `high`) and an optional `reasoning.budget_tokens`. Reasoning can be turned off entirely for fast, cheap calls.
3. **Reasoning summaries** : a request option to return a summary of the model’s reasoning, e.g. `reasoning.summary` (`auto` | `concise` | `detailed`), with the summary returned as a dedicated field or output item in the response, separate from the final answer text.
4. **Usage metadata** : report reasoning tokens separately in the usage object so billing and cost tracking stay transparent.
5. **Streaming** : stream reasoning summary deltas separately from answer deltas.

### Example usage

```json
{
  "model": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-5",
  "input": "Compare the tradeoffs of these two database designs.",
  "reasoning": {
    "effort": "medium",
    "summary": "auto"
  }
}

```

Example response shape:

```json
{
  "output": [
    {
      "type": "reasoning",
      "summary": [{ "type": "summary_text", "text": "Compared read/write patterns and..." }]
    },
    {
      "type": "message",
      "content": [{ "type": "output_text", "text": "..." }]
    }
  ],
  "usage": {
    "input_tokens": 120,
    "output_tokens": 640,
    "reasoning_tokens": 310
  }
}

```

### Workarounds tried

- Prompting the model to “think step by step” and show its work. This is unreliable, inflates the visible output, and gives no control over reasoning depth.
- Calling Claude directly through Anthropic’s API, which loses Perplexity’s search and tool integration, so I can’t use both in one workflow.

### Impact

- **Developers building agents/research tools** get predictable control over cost and latency per request.
- **Debugging and trust** : reasoning summaries make outputs easier to inspect, audit, and explain to end users.

### Additional context

Anthropic’s extended thinking and OpenAI’s reasoning parameters both follow a similar pattern (effort/budget plus summarized output), so a shared `reasoning` object could cover multiple providers cleanly.