Question

You have configured a customer-support assistant with three tools (order lookup, refund processor, and shipping tracker). A user asks a general question: 'What are your store's holiday return policies?' You want Claude to answer directly from its system-prompt knowledge without invoking any tool for this particular request. Which approach correctly prevents tool use for this call?

Accepted Answer

Set the tool_choice parameter to {"type": "none"} for this request so Claude answers without calling any tool.

Answer

Remove all tool definitions from the request permanently so they can never be used again in the conversation.

Answer

Set tool_choice to {"type": "any"} so Claude is required to select the most relevant tool.

Answer

Add a stop sequence matching the tool names so generation halts before a tool is called.