Anthropic says Claude Code now compresses each conversation turn and starts cloud sessions as you type, cutting wait times up to 3x
We keep improving performance across Claude, and you may have noticed it starts responding sooner! Claude Code now gzips the conversation it sends on every turn, so it reaches the model faster. Cloud sessions also start up as soon as you start typing.
Context
Waiting for the first word of a reply is one of the most noticeable delays in coding agents, and faster starts make tools like Claude Code feel more responsive.
This is a first hand post from Anthropic's Claude developer account. The speed figures are Anthropic's own measurements.
Deep dive
On October 16, the ClaudeDevs account posted that Anthropic keeps improving performance across Claude and that users may have noticed it starts responding sooner. It said Claude Code now gzips, or compresses, the conversation it sends on every turn so it reaches the model faster, and that cloud sessions start up as soon as you start typing.
The attached chart measures the wait before the first token, excluding model time, at the 90th percentile from August to October 2026. It shows Claude Code local sessions falling from 4.07 to 1.33 seconds, about 3 times faster, and cloud sessions from 16.99 to 6.00 seconds, about 2.8 times faster. Claude chat and Cowork fell from 3.36 to 2.17 seconds, about 1.5 times faster.
For the Claude API, the chart uses a different measure, median time to first token including model time, which fell from 1.53 to 1.01 seconds.
The gains come from the software around the model rather than the model itself. Earlier the same day, Anthropic said Claude now writes about 90% of Claude Code's own code, as covered in this deck.
What to expect next
Watch whether developers notice the faster starts in daily use, and whether Anthropic publishes more detail on how it measured the changes.
Also watch whether rivals such as OpenAI's Codex, Cursor and Grok Bot respond with their own speed figures, since responsiveness is becoming a point of competition. Further gains in model time itself, rather than the software around it, would be the next step for Anthropic.