Claude Desktop

Warning: Claude Desktop with AIRouter24 is only guaranteed to work with the Anthropic first-party provider. For maximum compatibility, we recommend setting Anthropic 1P as top priority provider when using Claude Desktop.

Why Use AIRouter24 with Claude Desktop?

AIRouter24 adds a reliability and management layer between Claude Desktop and Anthropic's API, giving you and your organization several key benefits.

Provider Failover for High Availability

Anthropic's API occasionally experiences outages or rate limiting. When you route Claude Desktop through AIRouter24, your requests automatically fail over between multiple Anthropic providers. If one provider is unavailable or rate-limited, AIRouter24 seamlessly routes to another, keeping your sessions uninterrupted.

Organizational Budget Controls

For teams and organizations, AIRouter24 provides centralized budget management. You can set spending limits, allocate credits across team members, and prevent unexpected cost overruns. This is especially valuable when multiple team members are using Claude Desktop across your organization.

Usage Visibility and Analytics

AIRouter24 gives you complete visibility into how Claude Desktop is being used across your team. Track usage patterns, monitor costs in real-time, and understand which projects or team members are consuming the most resources. All of this data is available in your AIRouter24 Activity Dashboard.

How It Works

This workflow assumes an Anthropic-compatible gateway. AIRouter24 currently documents the OpenAI-compatible /v1 API, so validate this workflow before publishing it as fully supported.

1. Gateway Mode: When you configure Claude Desktop to use the Gateway backend with https://airouter24.com/v1, the app speaks its native Anthropic protocol directly to AIRouter24. No local proxy server is required.
2. Anthropic Skin: An Anthropic-compatible AIRouter24 route would need to preserve model mapping, thinking blocks, and native tool use before this workflow can be considered fully supported.
3. Billing: You are billed using your AIRouter24 credits. Usage (including reasoning tokens) appears in your AIRouter24 dashboard.

Prerequisites

• Claude Desktop installed: Download the latest version from Anthropic.
• AIRouter24 API Key: Generate a key at airouter24.com/keys.

Configuration Steps

Step 1: Enable Developer Mode

Launch Claude Desktop — you do not need to sign in. Open Help > Troubleshooting and click Enable Developer Mode. This adds a Developer menu to your menu bar.

Step 2: Open the Third-Party Inference Panel

Click Developer > Configure Third-Party Inference… in the menu bar.

Step 3: Enter Gateway Credentials

Set the backend to Gateway (Anthropic-compatible) and enter your AIRouter24 credentials:

Click Apply locally to save your settings.

Step 4: Restart and Launch

Fully quit Claude Desktop and reopen it. On the start screen, choose Continue with Gateway (shown as "Local configuration"). No Anthropic account is needed.

Step 5: Select Your Model

The model picker will now display the models available through your AIRouter24 connection.

Claude Code

Claude Code is Anthropic's separate CLI-based coding agent that also works with AIRouter24. If you prefer a terminal workflow, see our dedicated Claude Code integration guide for environment variable setup, model configuration, fast mode, and GitHub Action integration.

Troubleshooting

• Connection Errors: Double-check that your Gateway base URL is exactly https://airouter24.com/v1 and your API key is valid. Make sure the auth scheme is set to bearer.
• No Models Appearing: Ensure you have credits in your AIRouter24 account. Visit airouter24.com/credits to check your balance.
• "Continue with Gateway" Not Showing: Make sure you applied the settings locally and fully restarted Claude Desktop (quit and reopen, not just close the window).
• "Access to this website is blocked by your network egress settings" using WebFetch: Cowork sandboxes tool traffic by default, which can block the WebFetch tool from reaching sites you haven't allowlisted. This restriction is specific to Cowork — the rest of Claude Desktop is unaffected. Open Developer > Configure Third-Party Inference…, switch to the Sandbox & workspace tab, and add the required hosts to Allowed egress hosts.
• Privacy: AIRouter24 does not log your prompts unless you explicitly opt-in to prompt logging in your account settings. See our Privacy Policy for details.