AI / Claude Models Basics Interview Questions
What is the Messages Batches API and when should you use it?
The Message Batches API allows you to submit a large number of Claude API requests asynchronously in a single batch, receiving results once all requests are processed. It is designed for large-scale, non-time-sensitive workloads.
| Feature | Standard Messages API | Message Batches API |
|---|---|---|
| Execution | Synchronous — response returned immediately | Asynchronous — submit batch, poll for results |
| Pricing | Standard per-token pricing | ~50% of standard pricing |
| Max output tokens | Standard limits | Up to 300k with output-300k beta header (selected models) |
| Latency | Real-time (<1 min typical) | Hours — not suitable for real-time apps |
| Max requests per batch | N/A | 10,000 requests per batch |
| Use case | Interactive apps, chatbots, real-time tools | Data processing, evals, bulk content generation |
# Submitting a batch of requests
batch = client.messages.batches.create(
requests=[
{
"custom_id": "request-1",
"params": {
"model": "claude-opus-4-8",
"max_tokens": 1024,
"messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Summarise: ..."}]
}
},
# ... up to 10,000 requests
]
)
# Poll for results
results = client.messages.batches.results(batch.id)Models supported for 300k batch output: Claude Opus 4.8, Opus 4.7, Opus 4.6, Sonnet 5, and Sonnet 4.6 support up to 300k output tokens per request in a batch when the output-300k-2026-03-24 beta header is included.
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