What
Claude Code now checks whether your gh is signed in by running gh auth token with a 5 second timeout, classifying the result as not installed, authenticated, not authenticated or unknown. An older gh without that subcommand reports unknown instead of quietly making a network call.
Details
- Parsing
gh auth statusis only used when the caller passesallowNetworkFallbackForOldGh.
Evidence
this GitHub CLI version has no gh auth token``
Strings lifted out of the shipped bundle, so the claim above can be checked against them.
Names in the bundlegh auth token
The entry above is what we published on the day. These lines were added later, as Anthropic's own pages caught up, and they sit beside the original rather than replacing it.
Added since
A small documentation edit on Get started with Claude Code in the cloud touched a line naming gh auth token after this was published.
When you run `/web-setup`, Claude Code reads the token that `gh auth token` prints, asks you to confirm, and sends the token to Anthropic. Anthropic stores it encrypted with your claude.ai account, and your cloud sessions use it for GitHub…web-quickstart see the edit
Confirmed since
Anthropic's documentation has since written up gh auth token, on Get started with Claude Code on the web.
When you run `/web-setup`, Claude Code reads the token that `gh auth token` prints, asks you to confirm, and sends the token to Anthropic. Anthropic stores it encrypted with your claude.ai account, and your cloud sessions use it for GitHub…web-quickstart see the edit
One source agreesOne thing we can check says the same as this entry.
Anthropic's documentation agrees
Anthropic's documentation has since written up gh auth token, on Get started with Claude Code on the web.