Anthropic launches public beta of message threads on the Claude platform

1. 20:35
   The Decoder

   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, which transmits only what has changed since the last message instead of resending the full conversation history. According to Anthropic, this cuts time to first token by about 35 percent for requests between 500,000 and one million tokens, with coding agents, computer-use agents, and document- or image-heavy workflows benefiting most. Threads stay encrypted in memory between requests and expire after five minutes of inactivity, token usage is unchanged, and the feature works on the Claude platform and through AWS, Microsoft Foundry, and Google Cloud.

1. 08:00
   Claude BlogFeatured

   Make long-running agents faster with message threads

   Anthropic announced that message threads is in public beta on the Claude Platform, letting agents send only new messages plus the previous response ID instead of resending full conversation history each turn. With message threads on by default for most Claude Code users, requests of 500k to 1M tokens saw median time to first token drop by about 35%, though token usage stays the same since Claude still reads the full conversation each turn. Threads are held encrypted in memory, expire 5 minutes after the last request, and are available on the native Claude Platform, Claude Platform on AWS, Claude in Microsoft Foundry, and Claude Models on Google Cloud (Anthropic managed).

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