Claude Code can pull skills down from the claude.ai account you are signed in to, and a new settings key switches that off. Set syncClaudeAiSkills to false in user or managed settings and nothing more is downloaded, previously synced skills in ~/.claude/skills/synced stop working and are moved to ~/.claude/skills/.trash at the next launch. Set it in .claude/settings.local.json or via --settings and the block covers only that workspace or invocation. Only false is honored.
- Sync itself is enabled per account on the server; the setting is an opt-out, not an opt-in.
- Your organization can also deny it: the capability check
allow_account_skills_synccoming backorg_deniedorunregisteredsets a session-wide veto. - Settings files that fail to parse also trigger the veto. An invalid value logs
"syncClaudeAiSkills" was present but invalid; treating it as false (claude.ai skills sync off) until it is fixed., and--managed-settingswith bad JSON logs--managed-settings ignored: invalid JSON objectand feeds the same veto. - While vetoed, a synced skill cannot be run or forked: invocation reports
Unknown skill: <name>and forking is refused with the reasonforked skill refused: skills-sync veto. - Sync requires first-party auth and a
claude.aiaccount source.
{ "syncClaudeAiSkills": false }"syncClaudeAiSkills" was present but invalid; treating it as false (claude.ai skills sync off) until it is fixed., forked skill refused: skills-sync veto, --managed-settings ignored: invalid JSON object, allow_account_skills_sync
Strings lifted out of the shipped bundle, so the claim above can be checked against them.
New in this build: syncClaudeAiSkills