Advanced tool use: programmatic tool calling and tool search
Public betas of programmatic tool calling and a tool search tool let Claude orchestrate tools through code and discover tools from large catalogs.
Programmatic tool calling lets Claude invoke tools from within code execution. The tool search tool discovers tools dynamically from large catalogs instead of loading every definition. Shipped with the Opus 4.5 effort parameter (beta). Both left beta in the 2026-02-17 API update.
- Date
- Monday, 24 November 2025
- Lab
- Anthropic
- Kind
- feature
- Access
- closed API
Features and dates are from the API release notes; the engineering post's text was not opened.
Sources
This record was checked against its sources on 6 October 2026. How we check