Five Claude calls each take 2 seconds. Run sequentially, the total wall time is 10s. What is the wall time if run in parallel, assuming no rate limit constraint?
Answer: 2 seconds
Parallel calls to the Anthropic API execute concurrently — the wall time is the longest single call, not the sum. Five 2-second calls in parallel complete in ~2 seconds. The constraint is your rate limit (TPM/RPM), not the model's ability to handle parallel requests.