Anthropic shipped two back-to-back point releases for Claude Code this week — v2.1.225 on August 8 at 01:09 UTC, followed by v2.1.226 roughly 90 minutes later at 02:48 UTC. The first is a meaty release with a genuinely useful new cost-control feature; the second is a quiet reliability follow-up. Together, they round out a busy week of Claude Code shipping.

Gateway Spend Limits Get Real Visibility

The headline feature in v2.1.225 is new: gateway spend-limit support in Claude Code’s usage warnings. If your organization runs Claude Code behind a gateway that enforces spend limits, the limit-reached message now names the actual cap, tells you when it resets, and surfaces any custom message your gateway operator configured.

This closes a real gap. Previously, if you hit an organization-imposed spend limit mid-session, the failure could feel opaque — a generic error with no indication of why you were blocked or when you’d be unblocked. Now the message is self-explanatory: here’s your limit, here’s when it resets, here’s what your admin wants you to know. Anthropic notes this requires the gateway itself to also be running 2.1.225, so both sides of the connection need to be current for the feature to activate.

For teams managing Claude Code spend across multiple engineers or projects, this is a small but meaningful improvement to the day-to-day experience of working within a budget — it turns a dead end into an informative pause.

Workspace Trust Prompts Arrive for claude agents

The second notable change extends an existing safety pattern to a command that didn’t previously have it: claude agents now prompts for workspace trust when pointed at an untrusted directory, matching behavior that the standard claude command already had. If you spin up agent sessions in directories Claude Code hasn’t seen before, you’ll now get the same trust confirmation step regardless of which entry point you use.

This is a consistency fix as much as a security one — closing a gap where one code path enforced a trust boundary and a related one didn’t.

A Long Tail of Reliability Fixes

The bulk of v2.1.225’s changelog is fixes, several of which address genuinely annoying failure modes:

  • Transient 401 fix: a bug where a long-lived CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN could get silently replaced by a stored login’s short-lived token, breaking headless sessions until a restart. This is the kind of bug that’s especially painful for CI/automation setups that assume a long-lived token stays valid.
  • macOS MCP OAuth keychain timeouts: MCP OAuth servers on macOS could intermittently fail with a burst of 401 errors — appearing as if authentication had never happened — after a keychain read timed out. Fixed.
  • Auto mode retry logic: a bug where auto mode counted a safety-filter refusal of its own permission check toward the consecutive-block limit. The action is still correctly denied, but the model is now told to move on instead of retrying against the same wall.
  • Cross-session message handling: messages between sessions could get stuck without a notice or expiry during headless sessions and startup. Fixed.
  • Remote Control conversation history: large conversations that got compacted could break history on session resume via Remote Control. Fixed.
  • Self-hosted runner startup: claude self-hosted-runner would register successfully and then fail every session if --base-dir couldn’t be created or written — now it exits at startup with a clear error instead of failing silently downstream.
  • Web session stuck-state reporting: Claude Code on the web was misreporting sessions as stuck and re-sending a growing event backlog on every reconnect.
  • VSCode Focus view: fixed a bug where the Focus view would fold away the latest to-do list, a pending question’s context, and settled answers; thinking-only folds now correctly show “Thought for Ns” and re-collapse when a turn completes.

There are also two Remote Control / SendMessage improvements worth flagging for anyone running multi-machine agent setups: photos attached from the Claude app are now shown directly to Claude instead of being read from disk via a separate tool call, and SendMessage can now initiate a conversation with Remote Control sessions on other machines by name — rather than only being able to reply after that session messages you first.

v2.1.226: Bug Fixes and Reliability

Less than two hours after v2.1.225, Anthropic shipped v2.1.226. The changelog is a single line: “Bug fixes and reliability improvements,” with no further public detail. Given the rapid cadence, it reads as a quick follow-up patch to something in the 225 release rather than a new feature drop — consistent with how Anthropic has handled other tight release pairs recently.

Why This Matters

Neither release is a headline-grabbing feature drop, but the gateway spend-limit visibility improvement is genuinely useful for any team running Claude Code at scale under a managed gateway. Combined with the workspace trust consistency fix and the long list of reliability patches — especially the headless-session token bug and the macOS keychain timeout — this is a solid maintenance release for teams running Claude Code in production, self-hosted, or CI contexts.

If you’re running Claude Code behind a gateway and want the new spend-limit messaging, make sure both your gateway and CLI are updated to at least 2.1.225.

Sources

  1. Claude Code Releases — GitHub

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