Nano Banana MCP: Use It in Claude, Gemini CLI and n8n

You can use Nano Banana inside AI agents and automations, because every route ends at Google’s Gemini API. The common options are an MCP server for Claude and other MCP clients, the nanobanana extension for Gemini CLI, Google’s own Antigravity, and workflow tools like n8n.

All of them need a Gemini API key from Google AI Studio with billing enabled, since image models have no free API tier. See the Nano Banana API guide for keys and prices.

What MCP is

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a standard way for AI assistants to call external tools. A Nano Banana MCP server exposes tools such as “generate image” and “edit image”; the assistant calls them, the server calls Google’s API, and the image comes back as a file.

Claude Desktop and Claude Code

Several community MCP servers wrap Nano Banana for Claude. The usual setup:

1. Get a Gemini API key and set it as an environment variable.
2. Add the server to Claude Code (claude mcp add ...) or to Claude Desktop’s MCP configuration, following the project’s README.
3. Ask Claude to generate or edit an image; it calls the tool and saves the result.

There are also Claude Code skills that wrap the Gemini CLI extension instead of running an MCP server. These are community projects, not official Google or Anthropic releases, so read the code before installing and keep your API key secret.

Gemini CLI

Gemini CLI has a nanobanana extension that adds image generation and editing commands to the terminal. Install the extension, set your API key, and ask for images in plain language from your project folder.

Antigravity

Google lists Nano Banana Pro among the models available to developers in Antigravity, its agent-based coding environment, so you can generate assets such as icons and mockups while you build.

n8n and other automation tools

Workflow tools can call the Gemini API directly: use a Gemini integration where one exists, or an HTTP request step with your API key, then pass the image to the next step (save to storage, post to social media, attach to an email).

Tips

• Store keys as environment variables, never in prompts or repositories.
• Set a budget alert in Google Cloud; agents can generate many images quickly.
• Use gemini-3.1-flash-image or gemini-nano-banana-2.1 for cheap drafts and gemini-3-pro-image for finals.

If you only need images and not automation, Nano Banana AI runs every Nano Banana model in the browser without keys.