Anthropic announced on October 17, through the ClaudeDevs account, that first-token latency in Claude Code has fallen sharply between August and October. For local sessions the p90 figure dropped from 4.07 seconds to 1.33 seconds, a gain of nearly 3x.

Cloud sessions improved from 16.99 seconds to 6 seconds, Claude's web and Cowork experiences improved about 1.5x from 3.36 to 2.17 seconds, and API first-token time fell from 1.53 to 1.01 seconds. Anthropic attributes the gains to gzip-compressing per-turn conversation payloads and to starting cloud sessions as soon as a user begins typing, rather than after they submit.

No new model is involved; this is an engineering speedup across the Claude lineup. For developers working in rapid ask-and-tweak loops, the cloud-session cut is the most noticeable change, though a 6-second p90 wait remains substantial.