Dictionary term
Context Window
Also called context length
AI FoundationsBeginner
The context window is the maximum number of tokens a model can consider at once, including both your input prompt and its generated output.
In plain English
The context window is how much text an AI can look at in one go, counting both what you send it and what it writes back.
Analogy
Like a desk that only fits so many papers at a time; anything that doesn't fit has to be left off.
Why it matters
It limits how much data (transcripts, contact records, docs) you can feed into a single Claude call inside an automation before you must summarize or split it.
In practice
A 200K-token context window can hold roughly a 500-page book of text in one request.
Related terms
Sources
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