Providers

Providers are LLM API adapters. Each provider translates Protege's normalized message format into the vendor-specific API shape (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) and translates the response back. This lets you swap LLM providers without changing anything else in your agent.

Built-In Providers

Protege ships with four provider adapters:

Provider	Default API Key Env	Capabilities
OpenAI	OPENAI_API_KEY	tools, structured output
Anthropic	ANTHROPIC_API_KEY	tools
Gemini	GEMINI_API_KEY	tools
Grok	GROK_API_KEY	tools

Selecting Your Provider

Your active provider and model are set in configs/inference.json:

{
  "provider": "anthropic",
  "model": "claude-sonnet-4-20250514",
  "temperature": 0.7,
  "max_output_tokens": 4096,
  "max_tool_turns": 8
}

The provider field selects which adapter to use. The model field is the provider-specific model name (without the provider prefix).

Internally, Protege combines these into a normalized model ID: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-20250514.

Manifest Configuration

Enable providers with defaults

{
  "providers": ["openai", "anthropic", "gemini", "grok"]
}

Override provider settings

{
  "providers": [
    {
      "name": "openai",
      "config": {
        "api_key_env": "OPENAI_API_KEY",
        "base_url": "https://api.openai.com/v1"
      }
    },
    {
      "name": "anthropic",
      "config": {
        "api_key_env": "ANTHROPIC_API_KEY",
        "version": "2023-06-01"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Configuration keys

All providers support:

Key	Description
api_key_env	Environment variable name containing the API key
api_key	Direct API key value (not recommended — use api_key_env instead)
base_url	Custom API endpoint URL

Anthropic additionally supports:

Key	Description
version	API version header value

Credential resolution

The engine resolves credentials in this order:

1. api_key in manifest config (direct value)
2. Environment variable named by api_key_env
3. Default env var for the provider (e.g., OPENAI_API_KEY for OpenAI)

Store your keys in .secrets or set them in your shell environment:

# .secrets
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...
OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...