Inference API reference - CoreWeave Docs

The CoreWeave Inference API provides programmatic control over inference gateways, model deployments, and capacity claims. The API is available at api.coreweave.com. This page covers cross-cutting topics: authentication, protocols, status values, error formats, and the OpenAI-compatible inference endpoint. For per-endpoint request and response schemas, see the per-operation pages under each service in the left sidebar:

The Inference API is versioned as v1alpha1. APIs may change before general availability.

Authentication

The Inference API uses bearer token authentication to identify the caller and authorize each request. All API requests must include a CoreWeave API access token in the Authorization header as a Bearer token. The token must belong to a user with the Inference Viewer or Inference Admin role, depending on the operation. Replace [API-TOKEN] with your CoreWeave API access token.

curl "https://api.coreweave.com/v1alpha1/inference/gateways" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer [API-TOKEN]"

For details on obtaining an API token, see Manage API access tokens.

Protocol support

You can call the Inference API over several transport protocols, depending on your client tooling and performance needs:

Protocol	Description
REST/JSON	Standard HTTP/1.1 with JSON request and response bodies. All examples in this documentation use REST.
gRPC	Protocol buffers over HTTP/2 for high-performance programmatic access.
Connect	gRPC-compatible protocol with improved browser and HTTP/1.1 support.

Query parameters

List endpoints support the following query parameter:

Parameter	Type	Description
`updatedAfter`	`date-time`	Filter resources to those updated after the specified timestamp (ISO 8601 format).

Status values

Use these status values to determine the lifecycle state of a resource when polling or reconciling state in your application. All resources share a common set of status values:

Status	Description
`STATUS_CREATING`	Resource is being provisioned.
`STATUS_READY`	Resource is active and operational.
`STATUS_UPDATING`	Resource configuration is being updated.
`STATUS_DELETING`	Resource is being removed.
`STATUS_ERROR`	Resource encountered a recoverable error.
`STATUS_FAILED`	Resource encountered a terminal error.

Each resource includes a conditions array in its status with detailed information about the current state, including timestamps, reasons, and human-readable messages.

Error responses

When a request fails, the API returns a structured error body that your client can parse to surface details to users or trigger retries. Error responses follow the standard format:

{
  "code": 400,
  "message": "name is required",
  "details": []
}

OpenAI-compatible endpoint

Deployed models expose an OpenAI-compatible completions endpoint through their associated gateway. The endpoint URL depends on the gateway’s routing strategy. See Gateways for details on how each routing strategy constructs the request URL. For a complete walkthrough, see the Getting started guide.

​Authentication

​Protocol support

​Query parameters

​Status values

​Error responses

​OpenAI-compatible endpoint

Authentication

Protocol support

Query parameters

Status values

Error responses

OpenAI-compatible endpoint