Compaction

Compaction extends the effective context length for long-running conversations and tasks by automatically summarizing older context when approaching the context window limit. It also keeps the active context small: as a conversation grows, response quality degrades, so compaction replaces older content with a concise summary.

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 might exceed the context window

How compaction works

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

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

On subsequent requests, append the response to your messages. The API automatically drops all content 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.

client = anthropic.Anthropic()

messages = [{"role": "user", "content": "Help me build a website"}]

response = client.beta.messages.create(
    betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
    model="claude-opus-5",
    max_tokens=4096,
    messages=messages,
    context_management={"edits": [{"type": "compact_20260112"}]},
)

# Append the response (including any compaction block) to continue the conversation
messages.append({"role": "assistant", "content": response.content})

Parameters

Trigger configuration

Configure when compaction triggers using the trigger parameter:

client = anthropic.Anthropic()
messages = [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello, Claude"}]
response = client.beta.messages.create(
    betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
    model="claude-opus-5",
    max_tokens=4096,
    messages=messages,
    context_management={
        "edits": [
            {
                "type": "compact_20260112",
                "trigger": {"type": "input_tokens", "value": 150000},
            }
        ]
    },
)

Custom summarization instructions

The default summarization prompt varies by model. Each default instructs Claude to write a summary inside <summary></summary> tags with the information needed to continue the task in a future context window. For example, some models use the following 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 through the instructions parameter. Custom instructions don't supplement the default prompt. They replace it completely:

client = anthropic.Anthropic()
messages = [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello, Claude"}]
response = client.beta.messages.create(
    betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
    model="claude-opus-5",
    max_tokens=4096,
    messages=messages,
    context_management={
        "edits": [
            {
                "type": "compact_20260112",
                "instructions": "Focus on preserving code snippets, variable names, and technical decisions.",
            }
        ]
    },
)

On Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1, a request with custom instructions summarizes from the visible conversation only: earlier thinking blocks are not part of the summarizer's input.

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:

client = anthropic.Anthropic()
messages = [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello, Claude"}]
response = client.beta.messages.create(
    betas=["compact-2026-01-12"],
    model="claude-opus-5",
    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-5",
        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.

This example appears in the SDK languages only: its value is the budget-tracking logic around the request. The raw request combines the trigger from Trigger configuration with pause_after_compaction from Pausing after compaction.

client = anthropic.Anthropic()
messages = [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello, Claude"}]
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-5",
    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 might 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: