A deep dive into how Anthropic's Claude for Chrome extension works under the hood, based on reading the extension's source code.
The extension is a Chrome Manifest V3 extension built with React, using the Anthropic JavaScript SDK directly in the browser. It opens as a side panel alongside the active tab and acts as an AI agent that can see and interact with web pages.
The Anthropic JS SDK is instantiated in the browser with dangerouslyAllowBrowser: true, authenticating via either OAuth PKCE (default, scopes: user:profile user:inference) or a manual API key (feature-gated for internal use).