Models
Extended Thinking
A Claude feature that gives the model a dedicated thinking phase before producing its visible response.
In depth
A Claude feature that gives the model a dedicated thinking phase before producing its visible response. During extended thinking, the model works through complex problems step by step internally, similar to chain-of-thought reasoning but happening behind the scenes. Extended thinking improves performance on math, code, and multi-step reasoning tasks. It uses additional tokens but produces more reliable answers for hard problems.
Example
In practice, developers reach for Extended Thinking when they need the capability described above as part of an AI feature or workflow.
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FAQ
Common questions
What is Extended Thinking?
A Claude feature that gives the model a dedicated thinking phase before producing its visible response.
Why does Extended Thinking matter for AI developers?
Extended Thinking sits in the Models part of the AI stack. Understanding it helps you make better decisions when building, debugging, and shipping AI features.
Where can I learn more about Extended Thinking?
Developers Digest publishes tutorials and videos that cover Models topics including Extended Thinking. Check the blog and YouTube channel for hands-on walkthroughs.
Related
Related terms
Models
Reasoning Models
Models specifically trained or prompted to show their step-by-step thinking process before producing a final answer.
Models
Adaptive Thinking
A Claude feature where the model decides how much to reason based on task difficulty rather than a fixed thinking budget.
Models
Generative AI
AI systems that create new content - text, images, code, audio, video - rather than just classifying or analyzing existing data.
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