Claude API: PDF support (beta) (via) Claude 3.5 Sonnet now accepts PDFs as attachments:
The new Claude 3.5 Sonnet (
claude-3-5-sonnet-20241022) model now supports PDF input and understands both text and visual content within documents.
I just released llm-claude-3 0.7 with support for the new attachment type (attachments are a very new feature), so now you can do this:
llm install llm-claude-3 --upgrade
llm -m claude-3.5-sonnet 'extract text' -a mydoc.pdf
Visual PDF analysis can also be turned on for the Claude.ai application:

Also new today: Claude now offers a free (albeit rate-limited) token counting API. This addresses a complaint I've had for a while: previously it wasn't possible to accurately estimate the cost of a prompt before sending it to be executed.
Recent articles
- Highlights from my appearance on the Data Renegades podcast with CL Kao and Dori Wilson - 26th November 2025
- Claude Opus 4.5, and why evaluating new LLMs is increasingly difficult - 24th November 2025
- sqlite-utils 4.0a1 has several (minor) backwards incompatible changes - 24th November 2025