You can stop Claude Code downloading skills from your claude.ai account with one setting.
What's wrong with this entry?
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.