Anthropic Reliability Patterns

Overview

Build fault-tolerant Claude integrations with built-in SDK retries, model fallback chains (Sonnet → Haiku), circuit breakers to avoid hammering a failing API, graceful degradation with cached/static responses, and per-request timeout configuration.

Built-In SDK Retries

The SDK retries 429 (rate limit) and 529 (overloaded) automatically:

const client = new Anthropic({
  maxRetries: 3, // default: 2
  timeout: 120_000, // 2 minutes
});

Model Fallback Chain