Version 2.1.319 landed in the npm registry on November 6 at 00:58 UTC, two days after 2.1.318. The changelog is long, and three entries in it change how the day goes.
A permission that denies instead of waiting
The new setting is permissions.denyInsteadOfPrompting. With it on, a tool call that would otherwise sit waiting on a permission prompt gets denied and the turn continues. That holds in terminal sessions, in subagents and for teammates.
For anything running unattended, this is the real news. A run stuck on a prompt nobody answers stays stuck until the timeout. With this setting it loses a step instead of an hour.
Auto mode without telemetry asks or denies
Until now, auto mode fell back to the built-in classifier when the server-side check was unreachable. That is over: with telemetry or feature flags off, including behind an LLM gateway, calls the server cannot check are asked about or denied. To keep the old behavior, set CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_MODE_SERVER=0. Bedrock, Vertex and Foundry are unchanged.
In the other direction, CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_MODE_SERVER=1 turns the server-side check on even when CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_EXPERIMENTAL_BETAS is set. If managed settings supply the latter, they have to supply the 1 as well. The matching new variable is CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_FEATURE_FLAGS, which stops flag fetching without switching off telemetry; every flag then uses its built-in default.
MCP tasks keep running in the background
When an MCP server runs a tool call as a task, Claude Code now moves it to the background immediately and tells Claude the result once it finishes. If you would rather it didn’t, set CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_MCP_TASK_BACKGROUND and Claude Code waits inside the tool call as before.
Smaller items are worth remembering too. /claude-api latency-optimize looks through your Claude API code for the places that make people wait and tries faster settings against your eval. /tasks gained an “Earlier in this session” row listing finished subagents, so you can reopen one and message it even after a restart. And /usage now shows spend for today, this week and this month to developers behind a Claude apps gateway who have no spend limit.
A date in the changelog that isn’t a feature
Among the gateway entries sits a startup warning for policies with no desktopHome that rely on coworkTabEnabled: false or chatSessionRetentionDays, worded “ahead of Claude Desktop’s November 10 change.” What changes on November 10 is not stated. Anyone managing Claude Desktop through a gateway now has a deadline and no description. Good moment to go read your own policies.