Anthropic has released Message Threads as a public beta on its Claude platform. Until now, every request had to resend the entire conversation history. With Message Threads, only what is new since the last message is transmitted.
What the provider measured
According to Anthropic, time to first token falls by about 35 percent for requests between 500,000 and one million tokens. Coding agents, computer-use agents, and workflows processing many documents or images are said to benefit most.
Limitations
The thread stays encrypted in memory between requests and expires after five minutes of inactivity. Token usage remains unchanged, since Claude still reads the full conversation history. The 35 percent figure is the provider's own claim for the stated token range.
Classification
Teams running long agent workflows can evaluate the change once the feature is available in their environment. Whether it delivers a noticeable benefit depends on conversation length and latency requirements and should be assessed with your own measurements.
Sources
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