Anthropic (Claude) key

Bring your own Anthropic key to score and categorise mentions with Claude. Without an AI key, BackTalk falls back to a free offline word-list scorer that only labels obvious positive/negative and returns unknown a lot; a Claude key gives you nuanced sentiment, categories, and priority on every new signal.

What it unlocks

• AI sentiment (positive / neutral / negative) instead of the offline lexicon.
• Category and priority tagging on each mention.
• A one-time background re-score of your existing mentions when you save the key.

You can save a key per provider. Left untouched, your first key powers filtering (sentiment, relevance, priority) and every saved key's model joins the AI share-of-voice comparison. Point either job at any saved key and model, including several models from one provider, under What runs each task in Settings.

Get your API key

1. Sign in at the Anthropic Console.
2. Add a payment method under Billing (API usage is prepaid/pay-as-you-go and separate from a Claude.ai subscription).
3. Open Settings → API keys and choose Create key.
4. Copy the key. It starts with sk-ant-… and is shown only once.

Add it in BackTalk

1. Go to Settings and find the Claude (Anthropic) card under AI providers.
2. Pick a model (see below) and paste your sk-ant-… key.
3. Save. BackTalk sends one tiny test request to confirm the key and model work, then stores the key encrypted and starts the background re-score.

Models & cost

You're billed by Anthropic directly, at their token rates; BackTalk never marks anything up and only shows an estimate. Sentiment prompts are short, so real spend is typically a fraction of a cent per mention. List prices (USD per million input / output tokens):

• Claude Haiku 4.5: ~$1 / $5. Fastest and cheapest; the right default for sentiment.
• Claude Sonnet 4.6: ~$3 / $15. More nuance on ambiguous mentions.
• Claude Opus 4.8: ~$5 / $25. Most capable; rarely needed just for scoring.

Settings shows a live usage ledger (tokens and estimated cost) once scoring runs.

Troubleshooting

• "The provider rejected that API key." The key is wrong, revoked, or from a different org. Regenerate it in the console and re-paste.
• "That model isn't available on this key." Your account can't reach that model yet. Add billing, or pick Haiku.
• Key check failed / timeout. Usually no billing on the Anthropic account, or a transient network issue. Confirm billing, then retry.

Your key stays private. It's encrypted at rest and only decrypted server-side at the moment of a scoring call. The plaintext is never sent back to your browser and never written to logs. Settings only ever shows the last few characters as a hint.

Rotating your key: create a new key in the Anthropic Console, paste it into Settings to replace the old one, then revoke the previous key.