Anthropic Claude Code Auto Mode Launches August 14 with Local Classifier and Permission Rules
Starting August 14, Claude Code will launch in auto mode on new sessions for Pro, Max, and Team plans. Instead of prompting the user with allow or deny for each tool call, a separate local classifier evaluates every invocation according to rules published by Anthropic.
The change affects only new sessions on the listed consumer and team plans. Users who previously set a custom default receive a one-time prompt to switch; administrator-enforced defaults remain untouched. Enterprise, API, Bedrock, Vertex, and Foundry deployments stay on opt-in for roughly one additional month.
Classifier rules and categories
The rules reside locally. On version 2.1.226 they are exported with the command claude auto-mode defaults. The resulting JSON contains four top-level keys with the following counts: allow (17), soft_deny (65), hard_deny (1), and environment (20). The entire rule set comprises 60,149 characters of English text.
The sole hard_deny entry addresses data exfiltration and is the longest at 5,278 characters. It instructs the classifier to examine the final recipient of any data transfer and explicitly states that base64 encoding does not change the nature of the operation.
The environment profile of twenty fields is only one-third populated on a clean machine, leaving thirteen entries set to “None configured.” The only trusted object by default is the repository where the session started and its remote. Users are advised to populate production endpoints, internal domains, buckets, and secret-management systems before August 14.
Auto-mode behavior and safeguards
The traditional allow/deny dialog remains available. The classifier blocks actions it deems irreversible, destructive, or outbound. After three consecutive blocks or twenty blocks within a session, auto mode pauses and Claude Code reverts to asking the user. Approving a blocked request re-enables auto mode. These thresholds are not configurable.
Broad allow rules such as python:* are disabled in auto mode because they would bypass the classifier. Narrow rules such as Bash(git *) continue to operate, and any entry in permissions.deny is evaluated first and does not involve the model.
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