Can Claude read and analyze PDF documents?

Yes, Claude supports PDF uploads directly in the claude.ai interface. Click the paperclip icon in the chat input, upload your PDF, and then ask Claude whatever you want about it — summarize this, find all the financial figures, extract the key action items, and so on. It works very well on text-based PDFs.

Via the API, you can pass a PDF as a base64-encoded document block in the messages array. Claude will then read the full content and respond to your questions about it. This is very useful for building document analysis pipelines or automated report processing workflows in code.

One thing to keep in mind is that Claude cannot read scanned PDFs where the text is stored as an image rather than selectable text. For those you need to run OCR first using a tool like Adobe Acrobat, Google Document AI, or the open-source Tesseract library before passing the extracted text to Claude.

Claude's long context window is a big advantage here. Unlike some AI tools that truncate long documents, Claude can handle hundreds of pages in a single conversation. This means you can upload an entire annual report or a lengthy legal contract and ask Claude to reason across the whole thing at once.