Anthropic has released Message Threads as a public beta on its Claude platform, successfully cutting the time to first token by approximately 35 percent for long conversations. Previously, every API request required resending the entire conversation history, but the new feature only transmits what has changed since the last message for requests between 500,000 and one million tokens.
The company states that this capability primarily benefits coding agents, computer-use agents, and workflows that process large volumes of documents or images. Between requests, the thread remains encrypted in memory and expires after five minutes of inactivity. While token usage remains unchanged because Claude still reads the full conversation history, the feature is available directly on the Claude platform as well as through AWS, Microsoft Foundry, and Google Cloud.
This performance improvement matters because it reduces latency for complex, data-heavy AI workflows and multi-turn agent interactions.