Create and add a Claude API key

Prerequisites

• A Claude Console account. This is separate from a Claude chat subscription, which does not fund API usage.
• Billing set up in the Claude Console.
• RoughCut 1.10 or later. You do not need the speech model for this step.

Anthropic controls this flow and changes it from time to time. The steps below describe the current shape of the process; if a button is named differently, follow the equivalent action rather than looking for exact wording. Anthropic's API key documentation is authoritative.

Steps

1. Open the Claude Console and sign in, or create an account. RoughCut's welcome tour names it too, in the line that begins Prefer Gemini or Claude? on its key page.
2. Set up billing in the Console. Anthropic bills API usage separately from any Claude subscription, and from RoughCut and RoughCut Pro.
3. Go to Settings → API keys and click Create key. Give it a name and an expiration, and set Linked account to yourself. Recommended: scope the key to a single workspace. Anthropic's own guidance is to create a key for the specific workspace an integration uses, and a key kept just for RoughCut can be disabled or deleted without touching your other keys.
4. Copy the key. It starts with sk-ant-, and the Console shows it only once; if you lose it, create a new one.
5. In RoughCut, open Settings. On the Basic tab (or Full → LLM) find Claude API key.
6. Paste the key into the field and click its Save button. RoughCut confirms with Claude API key saved to the Keychain. This button saves only the key.
7. Set LLM provider to anthropic and click Save Configuration at the top of the window.
8. Optional: next to Claude model, click Choose Model & Estimate…, click Refresh Models to list the Claude models your key can reach, choose a model and a Reasoning level, click Use Model, then click Save Configuration. The default is claude-opus-5-5 with the reasoning level default.
9. Test it: create a short job with Bad-take removal on. If the key and billing are correct, the job completes and the review list shows an editor summary such as Editor: Anthropic (claude-opus-5-5) — 12 spans.

Expected result

The Claude API key field shows a green confirmation with the value masked and the caption Saved in Keychain, plus Replace… and Remove buttons. LLM provider reads anthropic, and the Claude model row reads claude-opus-5-5 · reasoning default until you choose otherwise. A test job completes with AI-proposed cuts rather than a silence-only result.

Models and reasoning levels

Choose Model & Estimate… lists Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Fable 5.1, followed by any other Claude models your key can reach after Refresh Models, ordered by release date. The setting's own help text is candid about where Claude stands: Opus 5.5 is the starting choice; Claude models have not been scored on RoughCut's evaluation set yet.

On Claude, the reasoning level default sends no level, so the model's own default applies; the picker shows it as Default (medium) for Claude Opus 5.5 and Default (high) for Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Fable 5.1. The three listed models offer low, medium, high, xhigh and max. Higher levels are slower and cost more, and they do not always cut better. See Choose OpenAI, Gemini or Claude for how the level works.

Privacy and cost note

The key is stored in the macOS Keychain, encrypted by the system, and is sent only to Anthropic. When Claude is the provider, the AI editing pass sends transcript text and word timing directly to Anthropic under your key — never your video or audio. RoughCut has no servers in this path and never sees your usage or your bill.

Anthropic bills your key at its published rates. Long recordings cost more, a higher reasoning level costs more because reasoning tokens are billed as output, and Second Look adds another call. RoughCut does not publish a per-video figure; Choose Model & Estimate… estimates a job with your own assumptions, and Help → API Costs links Claude API pricing.

Managing and rotating the key

• Replace swaps in a new key without exposing the old one.
• Remove deletes it from the Keychain. RoughCut then behaves as if no key exists: silence-only cuts still work, and Bad-take removal fails preflight with a message telling you to add a key or turn the feature off.
• If a key ever leaks, delete it in the Claude Console and create a new one. Rotation takes seconds and there is nothing to migrate.

Common mistakes

• Expecting a Claude subscription to pay for API usage. It does not. API usage needs billing in the Claude Console.
• Saving the key but leaving the provider on OpenAI or Gemini. The key's Save stores the key only. Set LLM provider to anthropic and click Save Configuration.
• Reusing a key you created for something else. Create a separate key for RoughCut, scoped to one workspace, so you can disable or rotate it on its own.
• Pasting a key with surrounding whitespace or quotes. Paste the raw value.
• Expecting the key to appear in a settings file. It never does — secrets live in the Keychain only, and are stripped before configuration is written to disk.

Troubleshooting

RoughCut shows Claude's own error text after the prefix Claude, so the end of the message usually names the cause.