Claude Agent SDK vs AI SDK
Claude Agent SDK (Anthropic) and AI SDK (Vercel) side by side on public data, as of Oct 6, 2026.
AI SDK has 1.6x the weekly package downloads of Claude Agent SDK (34.5M against 21.5M). AI SDK has 3.3x the GitHub stars of Claude Agent SDK (27.1K against 8,219). Over the last 30 days downloads moved +1% for Claude Agent SDK and +21% for AI SDK. Claude Agent SDK shipped 50 stable releases in the past 90 days.
Side-by-side numbers
| Metric | Claude Agent SDK | AI SDK |
|---|---|---|
| Pulse Score | 59 | 67 |
| Overall rank | #17 | #11 |
| Downloads, last 7 days | 21.5M | 34.5M |
| Downloads, 7-day change | up 14.6% | up 13.5% |
| Downloads, 30-day change | up 0.6% | up 20.9% |
| VS Code installs | — | — |
| Marketplace rating | — | — |
| GitHub stars | 8,219 | 27.1K |
| Homebrew installs, 30 days | — | — |
| Hacker News mentions, 30 days | 6 | 6 |
| Latest stable release | 0.2.163 · 6d ago | 6.0.301 · yesterday |
| Stable releases, 90 days | 50 | |
| Terminal-Bench (best run) | — | — |
| Price | Free (OSS) | Free (OSS) |
| License | MIT (Python SDK) | Apache-2.0 |
| First released | — | — |
| Interfaces | Python library, TypeScript library | TypeScript library |
| Models |
Trends
Claude Agent SDK
Anthropic's SDK that exposes the agent loop, tools and context management behind Claude Code, for building custom agents in Python and TypeScript.
Pricing: The SDK is free to install; usage is billed through the Claude API or a Claude subscription.
Latest release 0.2.163:
- Updated bundled Claude CLI to version 2.1.286
- CI: pinned the model for issue triage to fix failures caused by the CLI's new default model
AI SDK
Vercel's TypeScript toolkit for building AI applications and agents, with one API across model providers and UI helpers for streaming.
Pricing: AI SDK is open source and free to use; you pay only for the models and infrastructure it runs on.
Latest release 6.0.301:
- Updated dependencies [3824c69]
- Updated dependencies [6e8ec70]
- @ai-sdk/gateway@3.0.210