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What Is the First Step When Claude AI Processes Your Text Input?
Understand the initial process when Claude handles your text: it first breaks input into tokens for numerical processing, enabling everything from context understanding to response generation in the Claude API.
Question
When Claude processes your text, what’s the first thing it does?
A. Generates a response immediately
B. Checks if it’s appropriate content
C. Breaks it into smaller chunks called tokens
D. Translates it to another language
Answer
C. Breaks it into smaller chunks called tokens
Explanation
When Claude processes input text, the very first step is tokenization, where it breaks the raw text into smaller units called tokens—typically subword pieces, words, or characters—that the transformer model can handle numerically. This conversion is essential because large language models like Claude operate on numerical representations rather than raw text; each token maps to an ID in the model’s vocabulary, enabling efficient sequential processing through its attention mechanisms. Without this initial tokenization, subsequent steps like embedding generation, context analysis, reasoning, or response creation cannot occur, making it the foundational preprocessing action in every API request.