Controls how aggressively Claude prunes conversation history to balance cost optimization with context preservation.
This setting is only supported for Claude models.
Controls how aggressively Claude manages conversation context by pruning conversation history when LLM token limits are reached. This setting allows you to balance cost optimization against context preservation for longer conversations.
Controls how aggressively Claude manages conversation context by pruning conversation history when LLM token limits are reached.Must be one of the following values:
Value
Pruning triggers at
Description
short
75,000 tokens
Aggressive pruning, cost-optimized
medium
125,000 tokens
Balanced approach
long
175,000 tokens
Default. Preserves most context.
max
175,000 tokens
Reserved for future expansion to >200k context sizes
When conversation context reaches the specified token threshold, Claude automatically prunes older messages from the conversation history to stay within limits while preserving the most recent and relevant context.
The max value currently matches long (175k LLM tokens) but is reserved to allow future expansion to >200k context sizes. Using max as the default ensures you’ll automatically benefit from increased context limits as they become available, while long will remain at 175k LLM tokens.
