Claude Desktop v4.4212.0 shipped on Wednesday, two days after v4.29.0, and bundles Claude Code 2.1.309.
The new setting for organizations is skillScanningEnabled, still in beta. Every skill a user creates or uploads then goes through a security scan before it can be used, and a skill that fails is blocked. Skills have been the easiest way to get someone else’s code into a Claude session for months, and until now the only check was trust.
The built-in browser now asks about your local network
The second change is in the in-app browser. It gained a per-site “Local network access” setting, with a prompt the first time a site tries. The target cases are sign-in pages that check for a desktop agent—Okta Verify, say—and sites that talk to devices on your own network. For administrators the setting hangs off builtinBrowserEnabled, and builtinBrowserBlockedDomains can block devices but not local apps.
Alongside it comes sessionStatusLine: one line of text above the message box in Cowork, Chat and Code, printed by a program the app runs. The conditions are strict. On macOS and Linux the program and every folder above it must be writable only by root; on Windows it has to live in Program Files on the system drive. And projectsEnabled: false hides projects in Chat and Cowork without deleting them.
A deadline, and a warning
One line is marked breaking and carries a date. After 12:00 PM PT on November 10, 2026, an unset desktopHome reads as standard. Unified Claude will then open with Cowork on, including in installations where coworkTabEnabled is false. If you do not want that, set the value explicitly before then.
The note on sshClientPath under Windows is refreshingly blunt. The path may now start with %LOCALAPPDATA%\ when machine-wide policy sets it—and whoever replaces a program there can read SSH passwords and get around sshHostAllowlist. That sentence is in the changelog itself.
Day-to-day items: provider API keys saved in Setup are now encrypted where the machine has secure storage, which means versions below 4.29 can no longer read them. Cowork shows “Billing issue” instead of “Something went wrong” when a provider returns HTTP 402. Code sessions ask before starting a dev server from launch.json, in Auto and Bypass modes too. And Settings > Usage finally counts the requests the app makes on its own, such as naming a session.
This is a release for administrators
Three entries say nearly the same thing: disableBrowserExternalNavigation, browserExternalPageTools and remoteControlAtStartup: false from a device’s local managed settings now apply even when the claude.ai admin console also has managed settings. Before, one source could quietly override the other. On top of that, the connection banner’s Details and “Copy report for IT” now list managed settings that were not fully applied.
Individual users get a handful of fixed annoyances. IT departments get an answer to the question of which policy actually wins—and that was the more expensive question.