Claude Code will soon run auto mode by default for Pro, Max, and Team plans, enabling longer-running autonomous work, and catching more dangerous commands than manual review in our testing.
We’re makingauto modethe default in Claude Code. Starting on August 14, new sessions on Pro, Max, and Team plans will run in auto mode. If you’ve already set a different default yourself, you may get a one-time prompt asking whether you want to switch to auto mode. If you have a pinned default, nothing changes for you. The auto mode classifier uses a small number of extra tokens per tool call, and we’re no longer charging Claude Code users on Pro, Max, and Team plans for that classifier overhead, effective today.
Auto mode remains opt-in for now on Claude Enterprise, the Claude API, Claude Platform on AWS, Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud’s Agent Platform, and Microsoft Foundry, giving admins time to review the change. In the coming month, working with our cloud partners, we plan to make it the default across all of these and no longer charge for classifier overhead. In the meantime, Enterprise admins can make Claude Code’s auto mode the default through managed settings.
Auto mode is designed to balance users’ desire not to be interrupted with a system that helps avoid harmful actions: instead of prompts, it routes each tool call through a classifier targeted at blocking actions that are irreversible, destructive, or aimed outside your environment. When the classifier blocks something, Claude usually finds a safer way to proceed on its own or asks you directly for the go-ahead; if it can’t make progress—three blocks in a row, or twenty across a session—Claude Code falls back to manual approvals.
We spent the last several months testing whether auto mode is as safe or safer than an average user clicking through prompts. We ran internal red-teaming, third-party red-teaming and prompt-injection evaluations, a controlled study with 1,053 paid testers, and analysis of real production sessions. On every measure we tested, auto mode matched or outperformed manual review.
Auto mode also lets Claude work autonomously for longer stretches. This makes models built for long-running work, like Claude Opus 5, more practical to leave running for hours on large tasks. Reducing overhead for users also increases output. Among Teams & Enterprise adopters, auto mode users ship about 25% more PRs. Unblocking Claude allows tasks to run longer uninterrupted and get more work done. Teams at Adobe, Nuro, Gusto, and Garner Health alreadyrun auto modeas their production default.
Data suggests that manual review can become habitual: users approve 97% of permission prompts in Claude Code. While most prompts are likely for safe, routine commands, an approval rate that high suggests many users are clicking through reflexively rather than reviewing each command. These prompts ask developers to make dozens or hundreds of important security decisions every day, often in the middle of projects, which places the review burden on users and increases the chance that something important slips through the cracks. Data also suggests that users more frequently scrutinize and push back on other types of dialogues: for example, when Claude presents a plan for approval, users reject 39% of them. But for individual permissions requests, the rejection rate is only 3%.
Permission rules still fire before the classifier in auto mode, except for allow rules broad enough to grant arbitrary code execution (e.g. python:*). These arbitrary rules are set aside while in auto mode, since they would let commands skip the classifier entirely. Settings files aren’t modified, and the rules apply again the moment you switch to another mode.
Research conducted internally and through several third parties suggests that auto mode is safer than how a typical user engages with permission prompts today. We tested auto mode against what developers actually approve when they’re clicking through permission prompts. Across each of these measures—internal red-teaming, third-party penetration testing, and analysis of real-world sessions—auto mode matched or outperformed human approval.
We hired 1,053 paid testers through a research vendor for a coding study. These participants worked in a test environment set up specifically for the study, not in their own codebases or on real projects. Participants knew they were being evaluated, but—following standard blind-study design—weren’t told which behavior was being measured. Partway through each session, a single permission prompt was swapped for a clearly dangerous command, and the vendor recorded whether the tester approved it (Note: approving the prompt never resulted in anything dangerous being run; only the text of the prompt testers saw was changed).
The testers caught the dangerous command just 13.6% of the time (143 of 1,053), while auto mode blocked 89% of the same commands (937 of 1,053). Head to head, auto mode blocked 800 commands that a human approved, while humans blocked only 6 that auto mode allowed. As sessions got longer, humans did worse: they blocked about 17% of dangerous commands early in a session, dropping to about 5% after 50 or more prior prompts, while auto mode’s block rate stayed flat regardless of session length.
Our research also suggests that auto mode leads to fewer harmful actions than manual permissions mode.