Context management

Compaction

Server-side context compaction for managing long conversations that approach context window limits.

Server-side compaction is the recommended strategy for managing context in long-running conversations and agentic workflows. It handles context management automatically with minimal integration work.

Compaction extends the effective context length for long-running conversations and tasks by automatically summarizing older context when approaching the context window limit. This is ideal for:

Chat-based, multi-turn conversations where you want users to use one chat for a long period of time
Task-oriented prompts that require a lot of follow-up work (often tool use) that may exceed the 200K context window

Compaction is currently in beta. Include the beta header compact-2026-01-12 in your API requests to use this feature.

Supported models

Compaction is supported on the following models:

Claude Opus 4.6 (claude-opus-4-6)

How compaction works

When compaction is enabled, Claude automatically summarizes your conversation when it approaches the configured token threshold. The API:

Detects when input tokens exceed your specified trigger threshold.
Generates a summary of the current conversation.
Creates a compaction block containing the summary.
Continues the response with the compacted context.

On subsequent requests, append the response to your messages. The API automatically drops all message blocks prior to the compaction block, continuing the conversation from the summary.

Basic usage

Enable compaction by adding the compact_20260112 strategy to context_management.edits in your Messages API request.

curl https://api.anthropic.com/v1/messages \
     --header "x-api-key: $ANTHROPIC_API_KEY" \
     --header "anthropic-version: 2023-06-01" \
     --header "anthropic-beta: compact-2026-01-12" \
     --header "content-type: application/json" \
     --data \
'{
    "model": "claude-opus-4-6",
    "max_tokens": 4096,
    "messages": [
        {
            "role": "user",
            "content": "Help me build a website"
        }
    ],
    "context_management": {
        "edits": [
            {
                "type": "compact_20260112"
            }
        ]
    }
}'

Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
`type`	string	Required	Must be `"compact_20260112"`
`trigger`	object	150,000 tokens	When to trigger compaction. Must be at least 50,000 tokens.
`pause_after_compaction`	boolean	`false`	Whether to pause after generating the compaction summary
`instructions`	string	`null`	Custom summarization prompt. Completely replaces the default prompt when provided.

Trigger configuration

Configure when compaction triggers using the trigger parameter:

response = client.beta.messages.create(
    betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
    model="claude-opus-4-6",
    max_tokens=4096,
    messages=messages,
    context_management={
        "edits": [
            {
                "type": "compact_20260112",
                "trigger": {
                    "type": "input_tokens",
                    "value": 150000
                }
            }
        ]
    }
)

Custom summarization instructions

By default, compaction uses the following summarization prompt:

You have written a partial transcript for the initial task above. Please write a summary of the transcript. The purpose of this summary is to provide continuity so you can continue to make progress towards solving the task in a future context, where the raw history above may not be accessible and will be replaced with this summary. Write down anything that would be helpful, including the state, next steps, learnings etc. You must wrap your summary in a <summary></summary> block.

You can provide custom instructions via the instructions parameter to replace this prompt entirely. Custom instructions don't supplement the default; they completely replace it:

response = client.beta.messages.create(
    betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
    model="claude-opus-4-6",
    max_tokens=4096,
    messages=messages,
    context_management={
        "edits": [
            {
                "type": "compact_20260112",
                "instructions": "Focus on preserving code snippets, variable names, and technical decisions."
            }
        ]
    }
)

Pausing after compaction

Use pause_after_compaction to pause the API after generating the compaction summary. This allows you to add additional content blocks (such as preserving recent messages or specific instruction-oriented messages) before the API continues with the response.

When enabled, the API returns a message with the compaction stop reason after generating the compaction block:

response = client.beta.messages.create(
    betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
    model="claude-opus-4-6",
    max_tokens=4096,
    messages=messages,
    context_management={
        "edits": [
            {
                "type": "compact_20260112",
                "pause_after_compaction": True
            }
        ]
    }
)

# Check if compaction triggered a pause
if response.stop_reason == "compaction":
    # Response contains only the compaction block
    messages.append({"role": "assistant", "content": response.content})

    # Continue the request
    response = client.beta.messages.create(
        betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
        model="claude-opus-4-6",
        max_tokens=4096,
        messages=messages,
        context_management={
            "edits": [{"type": "compact_20260112"}]
        }
    )

Enforcing a total token budget

When a model works on long tasks with many tool-use iterations, total token consumption can grow significantly. You can combine pause_after_compaction with a compaction counter to estimate cumulative usage and gracefully wrap up the task once a budget is reached:

Python

TRIGGER_THRESHOLD = 100_000
TOTAL_TOKEN_BUDGET = 3_000_000
n_compactions = 0

response = client.beta.messages.create(
    betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
    model="claude-opus-4-6",
    max_tokens=4096,
    messages=messages,
    context_management={
        "edits": [
            {
                "type": "compact_20260112",
                "trigger": {"type": "input_tokens", "value": TRIGGER_THRESHOLD},
                "pause_after_compaction": True,
            }
        ]
    },
)

if response.stop_reason == "compaction":
    n_compactions += 1
    messages.append({"role": "assistant", "content": response.content})

    # Estimate total tokens consumed; prompt wrap-up if over budget
    if n_compactions * TRIGGER_THRESHOLD >= TOTAL_TOKEN_BUDGET:
        messages.append({
            "role": "user",
            "content": "Please wrap up your current work and summarize the final state.",
        })

Working with compaction blocks

When compaction is triggered, the API returns a compaction block at the start of the assistant response.

A long-running conversation may result in multiple compactions. The last compaction block reflects the final state of the prompt, replacing content prior to it with the generated summary.

{
  "content": [
    {
      "type": "compaction",
      "content": "Summary of the conversation: The user requested help building a web scraper..."
    },
    {
      "type": "text",
      "text": "Based on our conversation so far..."
    }
  ]
}

Passing compaction blocks back

You must pass the compaction block back to the API on subsequent requests to continue the conversation with the shortened prompt. The simplest approach is to append the entire response content to your messages:

# After receiving a response with a compaction block
messages.append({"role": "assistant", "content": response.content})

# Continue the conversation
messages.append({"role": "user", "content": "Now add error handling"})

response = client.beta.messages.create(
    betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
    model="claude-opus-4-6",
    max_tokens=4096,
    messages=messages,
    context_management={
        "edits": [{"type": "compact_20260112"}]
    }
)

When the API receives a compaction block, all content blocks before it are ignored. You can either:

Keep the original messages in your list and let the API handle removing the compacted content
Manually drop the compacted messages and only include the compaction block onwards

Streaming

When streaming responses with compaction enabled, you'll receive a content_block_start event when compaction begins. The compaction block streams differently from text blocks. You'll receive a content_block_start event, followed by a single content_block_delta with the complete summary content (no intermediate streaming), and then a content_block_stop event.

import anthropic

client = anthropic.Anthropic()

with client.beta.messages.stream(
    betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
    model="claude-opus-4-6",
    max_tokens=4096,
    messages=messages,
    context_management={
        "edits": [{"type": "compact_20260112"}]
    }
) as stream:
    for event in stream:
        if event.type == "content_block_start":
            if event.content_block.type == "compaction":
                print("Compaction started...")
            elif event.content_block.type == "text":
                print("Text response started...")

        elif event.type == "content_block_delta":
            if event.delta.type == "compaction_delta":
                print(f"Compaction complete: {len(event.delta.content)} chars")
            elif event.delta.type == "text_delta":
                print(event.delta.text, end="", flush=True)

    # Get the final accumulated message
    message = stream.get_final_message()
    messages.append({"role": "assistant", "content": message.content})

Prompt caching

You may add a cache_control breakpoint on compaction blocks, which caches the full system prompt along with the summarized content. The original compacted content is ignored.

{
    "role": "assistant",
    "content": [
        {
            "type": "compaction",
            "content": "[summary text]",
            "cache_control": {"type": "ephemeral"}
        },
        {
            "type": "text",
            "text": "Based on our conversation..."
        }
    ]
}

Understanding usage

Compaction requires an additional sampling step, which contributes to rate limits and billing. The API returns detailed usage information in the response:

{
  "usage": {
    "input_tokens": 45000,
    "output_tokens": 1234,
    "iterations": [
      {
        "type": "compaction",
        "input_tokens": 180000,
        "output_tokens": 3500
      },
      {
        "type": "message",
        "input_tokens": 23000,
        "output_tokens": 1000
      }
    ]
  }
}

The iterations array shows usage for each sampling iteration. When compaction occurs, you'll see a compaction iteration followed by the main message iteration. The final iteration's token counts reflect the effective context size after compaction.

The top-level input_tokens and output_tokens do not include compaction iteration usage—they reflect the sum of all non-compaction iterations. To calculate total tokens consumed and billed for a request, sum across all entries in the usage.iterations array.

If you previously relied on usage.input_tokens and usage.output_tokens for cost tracking or auditing, you'll need to update your tracking logic to aggregate across usage.iterations when compaction is enabled. The iterations array is only populated when a new compaction is triggered during the request. Re-applying a previous compaction block incurs no additional compaction cost, and the top-level usage fields remain accurate in that case.

Combining with other features

Server tools

When using server tools (like web search), the compaction trigger is checked at the start of each sampling iteration. Compaction may occur multiple times within a single request depending on your trigger threshold and the amount of output generated.

Token counting

The token counting endpoint (/v1/messages/count_tokens) applies existing compaction blocks in your prompt but does not trigger new compactions. Use it to check your effective token count after previous compactions:

count_response = client.beta.messages.count_tokens(
    betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
    model="claude-opus-4-6",
    messages=messages,
    context_management={
        "edits": [{"type": "compact_20260112"}]
    }
)

print(f"Current tokens: {count_response.input_tokens}")
print(f"Original tokens: {count_response.context_management.original_input_tokens}")

Examples

Here's a complete example of a long-running conversation with compaction:

import anthropic

client = anthropic.Anthropic()

messages: list[dict] = []

def chat(user_message: str) -> str:
    messages.append({"role": "user", "content": user_message})

    response = client.beta.messages.create(
        betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
        model="claude-opus-4-6",
        max_tokens=4096,
        messages=messages,
        context_management={
            "edits": [
                {
                    "type": "compact_20260112",
                    "trigger": {"type": "input_tokens", "value": 100000}
                }
            ]
        }
    )

    # Append response (compaction blocks are automatically included)
    messages.append({"role": "assistant", "content": response.content})

    # Return the text content
    return next(
        block.text for block in response.content if block.type == "text"
    )

# Run a long conversation
print(chat("Help me build a Python web scraper"))
print(chat("Add support for JavaScript-rendered pages"))
print(chat("Now add rate limiting and error handling"))
# ... continue as long as needed

Here's an example that uses pause_after_compaction to preserve the last two messages (one user + one assistant turn) verbatim instead of summarizing them:

import anthropic
from typing import Any

client = anthropic.Anthropic()

messages: list[dict[str, Any]] = []

def chat(user_message: str) -> str:
    messages.append({"role": "user", "content": user_message})

    response = client.beta.messages.create(
        betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
        model="claude-opus-4-6",
        max_tokens=4096,
        messages=messages,
        context_management={
            "edits": [
                {
                    "type": "compact_20260112",
                    "trigger": {"type": "input_tokens", "value": 100000},
                    "pause_after_compaction": True
                }
            ]
        }
    )

    # Check if compaction occurred and paused
    if response.stop_reason == "compaction":
        # Get the compaction block from the response
        compaction_block = response.content[0]

        # Preserve the last 2 messages (1 user + 1 assistant turn)
        # by including them after the compaction block
        preserved_messages = messages[-2:] if len(messages) >= 2 else messages

        # Build new message list: compaction + preserved messages
        new_assistant_content = [compaction_block]
        messages_after_compaction = [
            {"role": "assistant", "content": new_assistant_content}
        ] + preserved_messages

        # Continue the request with the compacted context + preserved messages
        response = client.beta.messages.create(
            betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
            model="claude-opus-4-6",
            max_tokens=4096,
            messages=messages_after_compaction,
            context_management={
                "edits": [{"type": "compact_20260112"}]
            }
        )

        # Update our message list to reflect the compaction
        messages.clear()
        messages.extend(messages_after_compaction)

    # Append the final response
    messages.append({"role": "assistant", "content": response.content})

    # Return the text content
    return next(
        block.text for block in response.content if block.type == "text"
    )

# Run a long conversation
print(chat("Help me build a Python web scraper"))
print(chat("Add support for JavaScript-rendered pages"))
print(chat("Now add rate limiting and error handling"))
# ... continue as long as needed

Current limitations

Same model for summarization: The model specified in your request is used for summarization. There is no option to use a different (e.g., cheaper) model for the summary.

Next steps

Compaction cookbook

Explore practical examples and implementations in the cookbook.

Context windows

Learn about context window sizes and management strategies.

Context editing

Explore other strategies for managing conversation context like tool result clearing and thinking block clearing.

Was this page helpful?

Context management

Compaction

Server-side context compaction for managing long conversations that approach context window limits.

Server-side compaction is the recommended strategy for managing context in long-running conversations and agentic workflows. It handles context management automatically with minimal integration work.

Compaction extends the effective context length for long-running conversations and tasks by automatically summarizing older context when approaching the context window limit. This is ideal for:

Chat-based, multi-turn conversations where you want users to use one chat for a long period of time
Task-oriented prompts that require a lot of follow-up work (often tool use) that may exceed the 200K context window

Compaction is currently in beta. Include the beta header compact-2026-01-12 in your API requests to use this feature.

Supported models

Compaction is supported on the following models:

Claude Opus 4.6 (claude-opus-4-6)

How compaction works

When compaction is enabled, Claude automatically summarizes your conversation when it approaches the configured token threshold. The API:

Detects when input tokens exceed your specified trigger threshold.
Generates a summary of the current conversation.
Creates a compaction block containing the summary.
Continues the response with the compacted context.

On subsequent requests, append the response to your messages. The API automatically drops all message blocks prior to the compaction block, continuing the conversation from the summary.

Basic usage

Enable compaction by adding the compact_20260112 strategy to context_management.edits in your Messages API request.

curl https://api.anthropic.com/v1/messages \
     --header "x-api-key: $ANTHROPIC_API_KEY" \
     --header "anthropic-version: 2023-06-01" \
     --header "anthropic-beta: compact-2026-01-12" \
     --header "content-type: application/json" \
     --data \
'{
    "model": "claude-opus-4-6",
    "max_tokens": 4096,
    "messages": [
        {
            "role": "user",
            "content": "Help me build a website"
        }
    ],
    "context_management": {
        "edits": [
            {
                "type": "compact_20260112"
            }
        ]
    }
}'

Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
`type`	string	Required	Must be `"compact_20260112"`
`trigger`	object	150,000 tokens	When to trigger compaction. Must be at least 50,000 tokens.
`pause_after_compaction`	boolean	`false`	Whether to pause after generating the compaction summary
`instructions`	string	`null`	Custom summarization prompt. Completely replaces the default prompt when provided.

Trigger configuration

Configure when compaction triggers using the trigger parameter:

response = client.beta.messages.create(
    betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
    model="claude-opus-4-6",
    max_tokens=4096,
    messages=messages,
    context_management={
        "edits": [
            {
                "type": "compact_20260112",
                "trigger": {
                    "type": "input_tokens",
                    "value": 150000
                }
            }
        ]
    }
)

Custom summarization instructions

By default, compaction uses the following summarization prompt:

You have written a partial transcript for the initial task above. Please write a summary of the transcript. The purpose of this summary is to provide continuity so you can continue to make progress towards solving the task in a future context, where the raw history above may not be accessible and will be replaced with this summary. Write down anything that would be helpful, including the state, next steps, learnings etc. You must wrap your summary in a <summary></summary> block.

You can provide custom instructions via the instructions parameter to replace this prompt entirely. Custom instructions don't supplement the default; they completely replace it:

response = client.beta.messages.create(
    betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
    model="claude-opus-4-6",
    max_tokens=4096,
    messages=messages,
    context_management={
        "edits": [
            {
                "type": "compact_20260112",
                "instructions": "Focus on preserving code snippets, variable names, and technical decisions."
            }
        ]
    }
)

Pausing after compaction

When enabled, the API returns a message with the compaction stop reason after generating the compaction block:

response = client.beta.messages.create(
    betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
    model="claude-opus-4-6",
    max_tokens=4096,
    messages=messages,
    context_management={
        "edits": [
            {
                "type": "compact_20260112",
                "pause_after_compaction": True
            }
        ]
    }
)

# Check if compaction triggered a pause
if response.stop_reason == "compaction":
    # Response contains only the compaction block
    messages.append({"role": "assistant", "content": response.content})

    # Continue the request
    response = client.beta.messages.create(
        betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
        model="claude-opus-4-6",
        max_tokens=4096,
        messages=messages,
        context_management={
            "edits": [{"type": "compact_20260112"}]
        }
    )

Enforcing a total token budget

Python

TRIGGER_THRESHOLD = 100_000
TOTAL_TOKEN_BUDGET = 3_000_000
n_compactions = 0

response = client.beta.messages.create(
    betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
    model="claude-opus-4-6",
    max_tokens=4096,
    messages=messages,
    context_management={
        "edits": [
            {
                "type": "compact_20260112",
                "trigger": {"type": "input_tokens", "value": TRIGGER_THRESHOLD},
                "pause_after_compaction": True,
            }
        ]
    },
)

if response.stop_reason == "compaction":
    n_compactions += 1
    messages.append({"role": "assistant", "content": response.content})

    # Estimate total tokens consumed; prompt wrap-up if over budget
    if n_compactions * TRIGGER_THRESHOLD >= TOTAL_TOKEN_BUDGET:
        messages.append({
            "role": "user",
            "content": "Please wrap up your current work and summarize the final state.",
        })

Working with compaction blocks

When compaction is triggered, the API returns a compaction block at the start of the assistant response.

A long-running conversation may result in multiple compactions. The last compaction block reflects the final state of the prompt, replacing content prior to it with the generated summary.

{
  "content": [
    {
      "type": "compaction",
      "content": "Summary of the conversation: The user requested help building a web scraper..."
    },
    {
      "type": "text",
      "text": "Based on our conversation so far..."
    }
  ]
}

Passing compaction blocks back

# After receiving a response with a compaction block
messages.append({"role": "assistant", "content": response.content})

# Continue the conversation
messages.append({"role": "user", "content": "Now add error handling"})

response = client.beta.messages.create(
    betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
    model="claude-opus-4-6",
    max_tokens=4096,
    messages=messages,
    context_management={
        "edits": [{"type": "compact_20260112"}]
    }
)

When the API receives a compaction block, all content blocks before it are ignored. You can either:

Keep the original messages in your list and let the API handle removing the compacted content
Manually drop the compacted messages and only include the compaction block onwards

Streaming

import anthropic

client = anthropic.Anthropic()

with client.beta.messages.stream(
    betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
    model="claude-opus-4-6",
    max_tokens=4096,
    messages=messages,
    context_management={
        "edits": [{"type": "compact_20260112"}]
    }
) as stream:
    for event in stream:
        if event.type == "content_block_start":
            if event.content_block.type == "compaction":
                print("Compaction started...")
            elif event.content_block.type == "text":
                print("Text response started...")

        elif event.type == "content_block_delta":
            if event.delta.type == "compaction_delta":
                print(f"Compaction complete: {len(event.delta.content)} chars")
            elif event.delta.type == "text_delta":
                print(event.delta.text, end="", flush=True)

    # Get the final accumulated message
    message = stream.get_final_message()
    messages.append({"role": "assistant", "content": message.content})

Prompt caching

You may add a cache_control breakpoint on compaction blocks, which caches the full system prompt along with the summarized content. The original compacted content is ignored.

{
    "role": "assistant",
    "content": [
        {
            "type": "compaction",
            "content": "[summary text]",
            "cache_control": {"type": "ephemeral"}
        },
        {
            "type": "text",
            "text": "Based on our conversation..."
        }
    ]
}

Understanding usage

Compaction requires an additional sampling step, which contributes to rate limits and billing. The API returns detailed usage information in the response:

{
  "usage": {
    "input_tokens": 45000,
    "output_tokens": 1234,
    "iterations": [
      {
        "type": "compaction",
        "input_tokens": 180000,
        "output_tokens": 3500
      },
      {
        "type": "message",
        "input_tokens": 23000,
        "output_tokens": 1000
      }
    ]
  }
}

Combining with other features

Server tools

Token counting

count_response = client.beta.messages.count_tokens(
    betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
    model="claude-opus-4-6",
    messages=messages,
    context_management={
        "edits": [{"type": "compact_20260112"}]
    }
)

print(f"Current tokens: {count_response.input_tokens}")
print(f"Original tokens: {count_response.context_management.original_input_tokens}")

Examples

Here's a complete example of a long-running conversation with compaction:

import anthropic

client = anthropic.Anthropic()

messages: list[dict] = []

def chat(user_message: str) -> str:
    messages.append({"role": "user", "content": user_message})

    response = client.beta.messages.create(
        betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
        model="claude-opus-4-6",
        max_tokens=4096,
        messages=messages,
        context_management={
            "edits": [
                {
                    "type": "compact_20260112",
                    "trigger": {"type": "input_tokens", "value": 100000}
                }
            ]
        }
    )

    # Append response (compaction blocks are automatically included)
    messages.append({"role": "assistant", "content": response.content})

    # Return the text content
    return next(
        block.text for block in response.content if block.type == "text"
    )

# Run a long conversation
print(chat("Help me build a Python web scraper"))
print(chat("Add support for JavaScript-rendered pages"))
print(chat("Now add rate limiting and error handling"))
# ... continue as long as needed

Here's an example that uses pause_after_compaction to preserve the last two messages (one user + one assistant turn) verbatim instead of summarizing them:

import anthropic
from typing import Any

client = anthropic.Anthropic()

messages: list[dict[str, Any]] = []

def chat(user_message: str) -> str:
    messages.append({"role": "user", "content": user_message})

    response = client.beta.messages.create(
        betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
        model="claude-opus-4-6",
        max_tokens=4096,
        messages=messages,
        context_management={
            "edits": [
                {
                    "type": "compact_20260112",
                    "trigger": {"type": "input_tokens", "value": 100000},
                    "pause_after_compaction": True
                }
            ]
        }
    )

    # Check if compaction occurred and paused
    if response.stop_reason == "compaction":
        # Get the compaction block from the response
        compaction_block = response.content[0]

        # Preserve the last 2 messages (1 user + 1 assistant turn)
        # by including them after the compaction block
        preserved_messages = messages[-2:] if len(messages) >= 2 else messages

        # Build new message list: compaction + preserved messages
        new_assistant_content = [compaction_block]
        messages_after_compaction = [
            {"role": "assistant", "content": new_assistant_content}
        ] + preserved_messages

        # Continue the request with the compacted context + preserved messages
        response = client.beta.messages.create(
            betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
            model="claude-opus-4-6",
            max_tokens=4096,
            messages=messages_after_compaction,
            context_management={
                "edits": [{"type": "compact_20260112"}]
            }
        )

        # Update our message list to reflect the compaction
        messages.clear()
        messages.extend(messages_after_compaction)

    # Append the final response
    messages.append({"role": "assistant", "content": response.content})

    # Return the text content
    return next(
        block.text for block in response.content if block.type == "text"
    )

# Run a long conversation
print(chat("Help me build a Python web scraper"))
print(chat("Add support for JavaScript-rendered pages"))
print(chat("Now add rate limiting and error handling"))
# ... continue as long as needed

Current limitations

Same model for summarization: The model specified in your request is used for summarization. There is no option to use a different (e.g., cheaper) model for the summary.

Next steps

Compaction cookbook

Explore practical examples and implementations in the cookbook.

Context windows

Learn about context window sizes and management strategies.

Context editing

Explore other strategies for managing conversation context like tool result clearing and thinking block clearing.

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