Anthropic pushed Claude Code v2.1.228 on August 11, 2026, and the headline item is a security hardening fix for a real supply-chain risk: skills synced from claude.ai could previously shadow local commands or MCP prompts, and their bodies could run shell commands or expand @-referenced files on your machine.

If that sentence made you pause, it should have. Here’s what changed, why it matters, and what else shipped in this release.

The Core Fix: Synced Skills Get Sandboxed

Claude Code’s “skills” feature lets you (and your organization) define reusable, packaged capabilities that Claude can invoke — and one distribution path for skills is syncing them down from claude.ai. Prior to this release, a skill synced from claude.ai could:

  • Shadow local commands or MCP prompts — meaning a synced skill could effectively override or intercept something you’d defined locally or via an MCP server, without necessarily being obvious that it had done so.
  • Run ! shell commands from its body — a synced skill’s instructions could trigger actual shell execution on your machine.
  • Expand @ file references from its body — letting a skill’s content pull in and act on local files just by referencing them.

v2.1.228 closes all three paths for claude.ai-synced skills specifically. Per Anthropic’s official changelog, synced skills “no longer shadow local commands or MCP prompts, their descriptions are sanitized and labeled, and on your machine their bodies don’t run ! commands or expand @ files.”

Think about what that combination enabled before the fix: a skill definition — content that could in principle be edited or introduced by anyone with sync access, or compromised through a supply-chain issue upstream — had a path to executing shell commands and pulling in local files on your machine, without you necessarily realizing that the skill (rather than your direct interaction with Claude) was the one doing it. That’s precisely the class of prompt-injection-adjacent risk that’s been a recurring theme across agentic coding tools this year: the tool itself becomes a vector when it treats synced, less-trusted content with the same execution privileges as things you typed yourself.

Sanitizing and labeling skill descriptions is the complementary piece — it means the description text a synced skill presents to you (and to the model) is cleaned up, making it harder to use a skill’s own description field as a second injection surface.

What Else Shipped

The rest of v2.1.228 is a mix of reliability and UX fixes, per the official changelog:

  • Fixed interactive sessions that could stop redrawing entirely — while the process kept running — after a rare internal layout error.
  • Fixed git / Git Bash not being found on Windows when Claude Code is launched from a parent folder of the git installation.
  • Fixed /tui reverting the session to an earlier model when /model had been changed since the last response.
  • Fixed cross-session messaging sometimes starting without an inbox in the first session after install or upgrade.
  • Fixed Remote Control’s /resume leaking a resumed conversation’s title or history into the connected session when used on another machine.
  • Fixed claude self-hosted-runner sessions failing on every fresh runner when a checkout hook fails for a repository the session doesn’t push to — that repository is now skipped with a warning instead of failing the whole run.
  • Fixed self-hosted runners ending sessions in the gap between a background task finishing and the follow-up turn starting.
  • Fixed session cleanup that was deleting contents inside a project’s memory folder — a real data-loss bug for anyone relying on persistent memory across sessions.
  • Fixed background plugin-cache cleanup deleting a plugin’s cache when its only version was a symlinked development checkout.
  • Fixed a settings-merge issue where a marketplace entry redefined in a higher-precedence settings tier could inherit another tier’s custom headers; marketplace entries now merge as whole entries instead of field-by-field.
  • Fixed the deferred-tools reminder occasionally being sent to the model twice after a skill invocation.
  • Changed the Write tool so newer models can overwrite an existing file they haven’t read this session, matching the Edit tool’s existing rules (older models still require reading the file first).
  • Removed an outdated notice about Auto Mode sessions costing slightly more, which no longer applies for Pro, Max, and Team plan users.

Why This Is the Third-Plus Point Release This Week

Claude Code has been shipping point releases at a rapid clip — v2.1.224 through v2.1.227 all landed in the days immediately before this one, each with its own mix of fixes. v2.1.228’s skill-hardening change is the most substantive item in this particular release from a security standpoint, but it’s worth noting this is an incremental fix layered onto an already fast-moving release cadence rather than a standalone new capability.

If you’re running Claude Code with synced skills from claude.ai in any team or enterprise context, this is a straightforward one: update. Run claude --version to check your installed version, and update to 2.1.228 or later if you’re behind.

Sources

  1. Claude Code changelog — v2.1.228 — Anthropic, August 11, 2026

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