Artificial Intelligence
Anthropic launches Message Threads beta for Claude
Anthropic launched Message Threads as a public beta on Claude, saying it cuts the data sent between turns and reduces time to first token for very long conversations.
- Anthropic released Message Threads as a public beta on its Claude platform.
- The feature sent only changes since the last message instead of resending the full conversation history.
- Anthropic said time to first token fell by about 35 percent for requests between 500,000 and one million tokens.
- The company said coding agents, computer-use agents, and document- or image-heavy workflows would benefit most.
- Anthropic said the feature worked on Claude and through AWS, Microsoft Foundry, and Google Cloud, and that token usage did not change.
Anthropic released Message Threads as a public beta on Claude. The feature changed how API requests handled conversation state, so each turn sent only what had changed since the previous message.
Anthropic said that for requests between 500,000 and one million tokens, time to first token was about 35 percent lower. The company said the biggest benefits were for coding agents, computer-use agents, and workflows that handled many documents or images.
Anthropic said the thread state remained encrypted in memory between requests and expired after five minutes of inactivity. It also said Claude still read the full conversation history, so token usage did not change.
The feature worked on Claude and through AWS, Microsoft Foundry, and Google Cloud. Anthropic said the implementation details were available in its documentation.
Named in this story
Companies
- Anthropic
- released the Message Threads feature and supplied the performance claims
- AWS
- one of the services through which the feature worked
Products and systems
- Message Threads
- the new beta feature that sends only changed conversation data
- Claude
- the platform where Anthropic launched the feature
- Microsoft Foundry
- one of the services through which the feature worked
- Google Cloud
- one of the services through which the feature worked
How the source tells it
The piece reads like a product announcement, with Anthropic’s own performance and benefit claims carrying the story.
- vendor boosterism the company’s own claims about speed gains and workload benefits are presented without independent checking