Claude's API Now Takes 128 MB Requests, So Stop Resizing Everything First

On 28 October 2026 Anthropic raised the maximum request size for the Messages API and the Token Counting API from 32 MB to 128 MB on the first-party Claude API. It is a small line in the release notes and a genuinely useful change.

The obvious winner is anyone sending several images or PDFs in one call. Review rounds, contact sheets and multi-page client documents used to hit the old ceiling quickly, which pushed people into writing resizing and chunking code that did nothing except dodge a limit. A fourfold increase means a lot of that code can go.

Here is the opinionated part. Do not take the bigger limit as permission to send raw files. Large uploads are slower, they cost more tokens when they are images, and a 40 megapixel render gives the model no more useful information than a sensibly sized version. Resize for the task. If the model needs to read small text on a drawing, crop that region at full resolution rather than sending the whole sheet.

Keep your error handling too. The new limit applies to the first-party Claude API, so if you route through another provider or a gateway, check what that layer allows before you remove your safeguards.

The practical move this week is to find the one place in your pipeline where you split a request purely because of the old limit, and test whether a single call now works. Fewer moving parts is the real saving.