A Hands-On Guide to Anthropic’s New Structured Output Capabilities

Anthropic's latest models now feature a structured output capability, guaranteeing API responses will perfectly match a developer's specified format. This powerful feature solves a major challenge by ensuring consistent, predictable outputs, which is essential when feeding AI-generated data into other automated systems. By defining a JSON schema or a Pydantic model, developers can force the AI to return data in a clean, usable format, such as reliably extracting key facts from unstructured text. While the output's structure is guaranteed, the model can still hallucinate, potentially producing perfectly formatted but factually incorrect information.