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Claude Code Ollama

Ollama Meets Claude Code

Alexander Sedeke | 01/25/2026

A Game-Changing Step for Local AI Coding


Something pretty exciting is happening in the AI tooling world right now.

Anthropic’s Claude Code — their powerful command-line coding agent — can now be used together with Ollama, meaning you can run it completely locally using open-weight models instead of depending on Anthropic’s cloud API.

This feels like a big deal.

Anthropic has always been very protective of their Claude models, keeping them locked behind their official API and not allowing easy access in open-source tools. And yet, they’ve now made their excellent command-line tool compatible with self-hosted setups. That’s a surprising and welcome move.

What’s Really Going On Here?

On one hand, it looks like Anthropic is strategically opening up their tooling to win the developer mindshare battle.
By making Claude Code work beautifully with Ollama, they give people a taste of their agentic coding experience — but without giving away access to the actual Claude models.

It’s clever:

  • They open the front door (the tool itself)
  • They keep the treasure room locked (their best models)

Of course, this wall isn’t completely solid.
You can still access Claude models through services like OpenRouter in tools that don’t have native Anthropic support.
But the big open question remains:
Do these proxied versions deliver exactly the same performance, speed, and reliability as the official Anthropic API?
Most likely not in every situation — especially under heavy or real-time usage.

Still, for people who value privacy, offline capability, or just don’t want to pay per token, this Ollama + Claude Code combo is a massive win.

Claude Code


How Easy Is It to Set Up?

The integration is surprisingly clean and straightforward.

Step 1: Install Claude Code

1curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash


Step 2: Connect It to Ollama

You basically just point Claude Code to your local Ollama server.

Quick one-liner way:

1ollama launch claude


Or configure it without starting:

1ollama launch claude --config


Manual / more flexible setup

Set these environment variables:

1export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=ollama
2export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=""
3export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://localhost:11434


Then run Claude Code with any Ollama model you like:

1claude --model qwen3-coder

Or do it all in one line:

1ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=ollama ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://localhost:11434 ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="" claude --model glm-4.7


Which Models Work Best?

From my experience and what I’ve seen others report, Claude Code shines when you give it models with large context windows. These seem to perform especially well:

  • qwen3-coder
  • glm-4.7
  • gpt-oss:20b
  • gpt-oss:120b

The bigger the context the model can handle, the better it follows long coding sessions, complex refactors, and multi-file changes.

My Takeaway

This feels like a partial opening of the ecosystem from Anthropic — smart, calculated, and honestly pretty developer-friendly.

They’re letting people experience their excellent command-line coding agent locally and for free (with open models), while still protecting their crown-jewel Claude models.
It’s not full openness, but it’s way more openness than I expected from them.

For anyone who wants powerful AI coding help without cloud dependency, vendor lock-in, or token costs — this combination of Ollama + Claude Code is currently one of the strongest options available.

And the fact that the setup is this simple?
That’s the cherry on top.