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

AnnouncementProductNov 3, 2026

Anthropic launched Message Threads as a public beta on its Claude platform, reporting a roughly 35 percent reduction in time to first token for requests between 500,000 and one million tokens. The feature transmits only changes since the last message instead of resending full conversation history. Threads stay encrypted in memory and expire after five minutes of inactivity. Token usage is unchanged, and the feature is available through AWS, Microsoft Foundry, and Google Cloud.

Why it matters

Anthropic has introduced Message Threads, a public beta feature on its Claude platform designed to speed up long conversations. Previously, each API call required resending the full conversation history, which slowed responses for lengthy exchanges. With Message Threads, only the changes since the previous message are transmitted, which Anthropic says substantially reduces the waiting time before the model begins responding on very large requests. The company identifies coding agents, computer-use agents, and workflows handling large volumes of documents or images as the main beneficiaries. Threads remain encrypted in memory between requests and expire after a short period of inactivity, and token consumption is unchanged because Claude still processes the complete conversation history. The feature is available on the Claude platform as well as through AWS, Microsoft Foundry, and Google Cloud. For developers building agentic applications, this addresses a practical bottleneck in long-running, multi-turn workloads.

Receipt № 27031 source · awaiting confirmation ◐

Evidence

1source· awaiting independent confirmation

No score is assigned. Sources and their independence are shown in the citation chain below.

Citation chain · 1 source

01med
the-decoder.comBloghttps://the-decoder.com/anthropics-message-threads-cut-time-to-first-token-by-35-percent-for-long-conversations/This source reports Anthropic's own announcement of Message Threads, detailing the incremental transmission approach, the encryption and expiry behavior, and the cloud channels offering it.
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Google CloudCompanyAnthropicCompanyAWSCompanyClaudeModelMicrosoft FoundryCompany

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Canonical: https://the-decoder.com/anthropics-message-threads-cut-time-to-first-token-by-35-percent-for-long-conversations/