Anthropic cuts Claude Code response lag nearly 3x to 1.33 seconds

Anthropic has made Claude Code noticeably less sluggish. First-token latency for local sessions fell from 4.07 seconds to 1.33 seconds between August and October 2026, an improvement of nearly 3x. The fix was not a new model or an exotic breakthrough. It came from compressing conversation data and starting cloud sessions before users finish typing. Where the seconds went The update was announced on October 17, 2026, through the ClaudeDevs account. It covers several Claude products, with the headline gains in Claude Code. The key metric is first-token p90 latency. First-token latency is how long you wait before the model starts producing any reply at all. The p90 label means 90% of requests came back faster than that figure. For local Claude Code sessions, that p90 number dropped from 4.07 seconds to 1.33 seconds. Cloud sessions saw an even larger absolute cut, going from 16.99 seconds to 6 seconds, roughly 2.8x faster. The gains spread beyond the coding tool. Claude’s web and Cowork experiences improved by about 1.5x, with response times falling from 3.36 seconds to 2.17 seconds. The API also got quicker. First-token response time there went from 1.53 seconds to 1.01 seconds. The t...