Claude API launches the Usage and Cost Analytics API in beta and raises the request size limit to 128 MB

Background and pain point

Once teams wire Claude into products, internal tools, and agents, the usual question is where the money goes: which API key, workspace, or service account uses the most, and how that changes by day or hour. The older Usage and Cost API and the Enterprise usage reports had limited dimensions, and Console and Enterprise organizations had to integrate separately. Request size was another pain point: requests carrying many images, PDFs, or long context could exceed the 32 MB cap.

What changed and how it works

Per the official release notes, the Usage and Cost Analytics API launched in beta on Oct 29 with the analytics-usage-cost-2026-08-24 beta header. It has two endpoints: /v1/organizations/analytics/usage returns token and request counts, and /v1/organizations/analytics/cost returns cost in USD. According to the docs you can filter and group by model, workspace, API key, service tier, and the actor behind each request, with up to five group_by dimensions; time buckets can be 1 minute, 1 hour, or 1 day, and results are ranked by the chosen metric so top consumers come first. The cost endpoint can also split by cost type and token type. Console organizations use an Admin API key or an OAuth token with the org:admin scope, and Enterprise organizations use a key with the read:analytics scope. The old endpoints are now legacy but still supported. On Oct 28 the maximum request size for the Messages and Token Counting APIs on the first-party Claude API rose from 32 MB to 128 MB.

Benchmarks

This is a platform and billing tooling update, not a model release, so there are no benchmarks. Anthropic has not published data latency or how far back history goes.

How to use it

For an internal cost dashboard, the official SDK's client.beta.organization.analytics.usage.list can pull daily, per-model data, and the SDK adds the beta header and paginates for you. Give the collector its own Admin key and rotate it, or follow the docs and use Workload Identity Federation for short-lived tokens. Integrations built on usage_report or cost_report can follow the official migration guides. Apps that send many images or documents in one call can now go up to 128 MB on the first-party API; check the docs separately for cloud provider limits.