Starting August 14, new Claude Code sessions on Pro, Max, and Team plans stop asking before every file edit, command, or push, and start running on their own — a classifier reviews each action instead and only interrupts you when it judges something irreversible, destructive, or aimed outside your own environment. If you already picked a manual-approval default yourself, Anthropic says it stays put; you'll get a one-time notification with the option to switch, not an override. Everyone else gets moved automatically. What follows is exactly which settings control this, sourced from Anthropic's own configuration reference rather than guessed at from the announcement.
Set the permission boundary you actually want
- Full manual is the simplest choice and costs nothing but the prompts you'll see again. Keeping auto mode with checkpoints is the choice if you mostly trust it but want a human eye on specific actions like pushes.
- This switches your permission mode immediately for the current and future sessions.
- In ~/.claude/settings.json (or managed settings for a whole org), add: {"permissions":{"ask":["Bash(git push *)","Bash(gh pr create *)"]}}. Content-scoped ask rules are evaluated before the classifier and always force a prompt.
- Add your source-control org and key internal services to autoMode.environment in ~/.claude/settings.json, keeping the literal string "$defaults" in the array so you extend the built-in rules instead of replacing them.
- Open /permissions and look at the Recently denied tab.
Steps 3 and 4 above are the two settings most people actually want: one keeps a human in the loop on the action with the widest blast radius, the other stops the classifier from flagging your own team's routine work. Both live in the same file, so it's one edit, not two.
A settings.json that checkpoints pushes and trusts your own org
None of this is a verdict on whether auto mode itself is safe enough — independent researchers have said they want more confirmation of Anthropic's own numbers before trusting the classifier at scale. This guide only covers the mechanical question: which setting does what, so you're choosing your own boundary deliberately on August 14 instead of discovering it by watching what Claude Code does next.
- Claude Code's auto mode becomes the default for new sessions on Pro, Max, and Team plans August 14.
- Press Shift+Tab in the CLI, or use the desktop app's mode dropdown, to switch modes any time.
- To keep auto mode but checkpoint pushes only, add a permissions.ask rule to your settings file.
- Caveat: a default you already set yourself is preserved — this guide is for everyone else.