Anthropic's Message Threads cut time to first token by 35 percent for long conversations

Anthropic released Message Threads as a public beta on its Claude platform. Until now, every API request had to resend the entire conversation history. Message Threads only transmits what's changed since the last message, cutting time to first token by about 35 percent for requests between 500,000 and one million tokens, according to Anthropic.

Coding agents, computer-use agents, and workflows processing lots of documents or images benefit the most, the company says. The thread stays encrypted in memory between requests and expires after five minutes of inactivity. Token usage doesn't change since Claude still reads the full conversation history. The feature works on the Claude platform and through AWS, Microsoft Foundry, and Google Cloud. Details are in the documentation.

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