- Auto mode for Claude is designed to approve safe actions and only seek permission for risky actions
- Anthropic knows developers have been skipping permissions altogether
- Research preview 'auto mode' rolling out to Teams, then Enterprise/API
Anthropic has launched a new 'auto mode' for Claude Code, which will ultimately let the AI tool decide permissions autonomously instead of asking users for approval to perform certain tasks.
The company said the update can speed up workflows by reducing the number of interruptions during long coding tasks – at the moment, without use approval, Claude Code hits a roadblock and can't proceed.
In short, it works by passing permission requests through a classifier to review every action before execution – allowing safe actions automatically but blocking potentially risky actions like file deletion.
Claude Code auto mode
"Claude Code's default permissions are purposefully conservative," the company wrote, acknowledging that bigger tasks can take longer than intended as a result. The company also knows that some developers are skipping permissions altogether, which can be seriously risky for data security, hence the launch of auto mode, Claude's "middle path."
When it thinks it's faced with something risky, the classifier prompts a permission request to the user.
The upgrade is being launched as a research preview, therefore it may not be fully reliable yet and may allow some risky actions if the context is unclear. It may also block safe actions unnecessarily, but improvements should roll out over time to make it more reliable.
It's also only being made available to Teams users for now, but we can expect a broader rollout to Enterprise and API users soon.
It only works with Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6, and while backward compatibility is unlikely, it'll likely support future generations of these models.
