Integrating Claude/OpenAI API into a Laravel App: A Practical Guide

After 12+ years of building PHP applications, I recently added AI-powered features to a production Laravel dashboard — automatic report summaries generated from raw analytics data. What surprised me wasn't how hard it was. It was how little good PHP-focused content exists on this topic. Almost every LLM tutorial assumes you're writing Python. So here's the guide I wish I had: integrating the Claude API and OpenAI API into a Laravel app, with a clean architecture you can actually ship to production. What we'll build: a ReportSummaryService that takes raw data and returns a human-readable summary — with a driver pattern so you can switch between Claude and OpenAI with one config change. Step 1: Get Your API Keys Claude: Sign up at the Claude Console , generate a key under Account Settings. OpenAI: Get a key from the OpenAI Platform . Add them to your .env : AI_PROVIDER=claude ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-xxxxx ANTHROPIC_MODEL=claude-sonnet-4-6 OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-xxxxx OPENAI_MODEL=gpt-5-mini ⚠️ Never hardcode API keys. Never commit them. If you've ever pushed a key to Git, rotate it immediately. (You know this. I'm saying it anyway.) Now register them in config/services.php — this is the Laravel way, so you can use config() everywhere and benefit from config caching: 'anthropic' => [ 'key' => env ( 'ANTHROPIC_API_KEY' ), 'model' => env ( 'ANTHROPIC_MODEL' , 'claude-sonnet-4-6' ), ], 'openai' => [ 'key' => env ( 'OPENAI_API_KEY' ), 'model' => env ( 'OPENAI_MODEL' , 'gpt-5-mini' ), ], 'ai' => [ 'provider' => env ( 'AI_PROVIDER' , 'claude' ), ], Step 2: Understand the Two APIs (They're 95% Similar) Both are simple REST APIs. You POST JSON, you get JSON back. Claude (Messages API): POST https://api.anthropic.com/v1/messages Headers: x-api-key: YOUR_KEY anthropic-version: 2023-06-01 content-type: application/json OpenAI (Chat Completions API): POST https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions Headers: Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY content-type: application/json The key differenc