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Claude Science can run jobs on Modal using a Modal account you own and control. You connect your account, jobs run on it, and Modal bills you directly. Anthropic doesn’t provide or bill compute and never sees a payment method.

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Connecting Modal

In Settings > Compute > Cloud providers, click Connect on the Modal card. If you’ve signed in with the Modal CLI (modal token new), the app reads ~/.modal.toml automatically; click Check again after the file exists. Alternatively, paste a Token ID and Token secret in Settings > Credentials, under Modal. Tokens are stored encrypted on your computer and never shown to Claude.

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Running cloud jobs

When work needs a GPU or more memory than your machine has, Claude proposes a job and a Start a Modal job? card appears. The card shows the Modal profile, exact machine spec (for example, H100, 8 CPUs, 32 GiB), a note that billing is per-second, and the maximum billable time. It links to Modal’s pricing page. Approve per job, or for the conversation or project. A separate card asks before Claude opens a Modal setup shell (capped at 30 minutes, no GPU). Input files are limited to 1 GiB per submit. For larger inputs, Claude can stage data to a Modal Volume and mount it into the job. Outputs written to ./out/ (up to 5 GiB) are returned with logs.
Closing the app doesn’t cancel a running Modal job; it continues billing until it finishes or times out.
Cost controls: there’s no spend ceiling. Each job is approved individually with its machine and time limit visible. Concurrent jobs (default 10, set on the Modal page under Settings > Compute) caps simultaneous containers that Claude Science on this machine can run. Default container timeout is 12 hours (maximum 23), enforced by Modal. Track spend on Modal’s dashboard. On the Modal page under Settings > Compute you can set the Modal environment and the default application name used for containers.

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Container images

Claude derives a container image from the environment a job needs and builds it once on Modal’s build servers, then reuses that image for later jobs until the environment changes. Claude tracks built images in the Details document on the Modal page under Settings > Compute.