Google and Vertex have an interesting relationship. I always wondered why Google was hosting Anthropic models in it’s VertexAI Model Garden. But there was news this last week that Google owns ~14% of Anthropic.
I learned you can call Claude via VertexAI. This allows you to use tools that are built on Claude like Cline and Claude Code with Vertex.
To use Claude Code with VertexAI, if you already have your application-default credentials setup, you can just set a few environment variables.
CLAUDE_CODE_USE_VERTEX=1
CLOUD_ML_REGION=us-east5
ANTHROPIC_VERTEX_PROJECT_ID=your-project-id