LLM Reference
GCP Vertex AI

Using Claude Opus 5 on GCP Vertex AI

Implementation guide · Claude 5 · Anthropic

Serverless

GCP Vertex AI exposes Claude Opus 5 through model ID claude-opus-5. Use the setup steps, sourced pricing, capabilities, and official provider links below to validate this route before deployment.

Last refreshed 2026-07-26. Next refresh: weekly.

Quick Start

  1. 1
    Create an account at GCP Vertex AI and generate an API key.
  2. 2
    Use the GCP Vertex AI SDK or REST API to call claude-opus-5 — see the documentation for request format.
  3. 3
    You'll be billed $5.00/1M input, $25.00/1M output tokens. See full pricing.

Code Examples

Install
pip install google-cloud-aiplatform
API key
GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT
Model ID
claude-opus-5

For Google-published models use the model name directly, e.g. "gemini-2.0-flash-001". For third-party publishers (Anthropic, Meta, etc.) use the full publisher path, e.g. "publishers/anthropic/models/claude-3-5-sonnet-v2@20241022".

import os
import vertexai
from vertexai.generative_models import GenerativeModel

# Reads GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT from env; authenticates via Application Default Credentials
vertexai.init(project=os.environ["GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT"], location="us-central1")
model = GenerativeModel("claude-opus-5")
response = model.generate_content("Hello")
print(response.text)

Pricing on GCP Vertex AI

TypePrice (per 1M)
Input tokens$5.00
Output tokens$25.00
Image input$1.00

Capabilities

VisionMultimodalReasoningJSON / Tool useStructured OutputsCode ExecutionPrompt CachingBatch API

About Claude Opus 5

Claude Opus 5 is Anthropic's July 2026 flagship Opus model for complex agentic coding, enterprise work, long-horizon reasoning, computer use, and professional analysis. It accepts text and image input and returns text, with adaptive thinking enabled by default and five request-level effort settings from low through max that control thinking depth and token use rather than visible response length. It also supports tool use, structured outputs, prompt caching, Batch API, a 1M-token context window, and up to 128K synchronous output tokens.

Model Specs

Released2026-07-24
Context1m
ArchitectureDecoder Only
Knowledge cutoff2026-05

Provider

GCP Vertex AI
GCP Vertex AI

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Mountain View, California, United States