Anthropic Launches Message Threads to Cut Agent Latency by ~35%
Anthropic has released a public beta of 'message threads' for its Claude Platform, allowing agents to send only new messages instead of full history, reducing Time to First Token (TTFT) by approximately 35% for long contexts.
Anthropic announced on November 2, 2026, that 'message threads' is now available in public beta on the Claude Platform's Messages API. This feature aims to address the latency issues caused by long-running AI agents needing to resend their entire conversation history on every turn.
In traditional setups, coding or computer-use agents might make hundreds of requests in a single session, each including all previous messages and tool results. Once a conversation reaches hundreds of thousands of tokens, resending this data adds significant time before Claude begins responding. With message threads, agents send only what’s new since the last turn along with the ID of the previous response. Anthropic reports that for requests with 500k to 1M tokens, the median Time to First Token (TTFT) drops by about 35%.
Technically, Anthropic holds each thread in encrypted memory between turns without writing it to disk. A thread expires five minutes after its last request, at which point the client must resend the full conversation to start a new one. Although each request is smaller, Claude still reads the full conversation on every turn, so token usage remains unchanged.
The feature is best suited for active sessions where latency matters, such as long-running coding agents, computer-use agents, and document/image-heavy workflows. Message threads is currently available on the native Claude Platform, Claude Platform on AWS, Claude in Microsoft Foundry, and Claude Models on Google Cloud (Anthropic managed). Standard Claude token rates and existing rate limits apply.