Anthropic introduces Message Threads for faster long-context API requests

Anthropic has released Message Threads as a public beta on the Claude platform. Previously, each request through the Messages API had to include the complete conversation history. With Message Threads, subsequent requests transmit only the information that has changed since the preceding message. Anthropic says this reduces time to first token by about 35 percent for requests containing between 500,000 and one million tokens.

The company identifies coding agents, computer-use agents, and workflows that handle large volumes of documents or images as the main potential beneficiaries. The thread remains encrypted in memory between requests and is deleted after five minutes without activity. Token consumption does not decrease, because Claude continues to read the entire conversation history. Message Threads is available on Claude and through AWS, Microsoft Foundry, and Google Cloud.