Real‐time compensation for thermally induced beam distortion has been demonstrated using a phase‐adaptive aperture subdivided into 18 elements coupled with an 18‐channel multidither servo system. The results were obtained using an argon ion laser and a nonlinear liquid cell placed in the near field of the transmitted beam. The system increased the peak beam irradiance by more than a factor of 4 at the highest power used and reduced the beamwidth by a factor of 5.4 from the uncorrected bloomed case. A comparison with predictions from existing theory is given.