AI Development
Parallel Tool Calls
The ability of a model to request several tool calls in a single response instead of one call per turn.
In depth
The ability of a model to request several tool calls in a single response instead of one call per turn. Your application runs them, sequentially or concurrently, and returns one result for each call, all together in the next message. This cuts round trips when calls are independent, such as reading three files at once. Both major APIs enable it by default; you turn it off with parallel_tool_calls: false in OpenAI's API or disable_parallel_tool_use: true inside tool_choice in Anthropic's.
Primary source: platform.claude.com
Example
This cuts round trips when calls are independent, such as reading three files at once.
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FAQ
Common questions
What is Parallel Tool Calls?
The ability of a model to request several tool calls in a single response instead of one call per turn.
Why does Parallel Tool Calls matter for AI developers?
Parallel Tool Calls sits in the AI Development part of the AI stack. Understanding it helps you make better decisions when building, debugging, and shipping AI features.
Where can I learn more about Parallel Tool Calls?
Developers Digest publishes tutorials and videos that cover AI Development topics including Parallel Tool Calls. Check the blog and YouTube channel for hands-on walkthroughs.
Related
Related terms
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Pipeline Parallelism
A model-parallel technique that splits a network by layers into sequential stages on different accelerators, passing activations from one stage to the next.
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Code Execution Tool
A server-side tool in the Claude API that lets the model run Bash commands and create, view, and edit files inside an Anthropic-hosted sandboxed container.
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Model Card
A model card is a short document published with a trained machine learning model that explains its intended uses, its limitations, and how it performs across different conditions and groups.
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