You'll noticeTier: how much it should matter to you
2Useful: my rating, 1 to 5
1Signal: worth watching, 1 to 5
Managed SettingsArea: what it touches
ImprovementsKind: in v2.1.283,
ImprovementsSection of the release
What
Besides your main conversation, Claude Code makes small helper requests to a model, for jobs such as generating titles. If the model a helper request asks for is blocked by the deniedModels policy, the request now goes to the model running your main conversation, and a debug line records the switch. Previously the requested model was always used.
If the helper asked for extended thinking to be off and the substitute model cannot turn it off, thinking is left at the model's default and the response length limit is raised by 2048 tokens.
Why
Helper features no longer break when an admin denies a small model such as Haiku.
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.
Confirmed sinceAnthropic's documentation has since written up deniedModels, on Deploy managed settings.| Lists | Combines the entries from every source | `permissions.allow`, `hooks`, `sandbox.network.allowedDomains`, `deniedMcpServers`, `deniedModels` |managed-settingssee the edit
How sure we are
Two sources agreeTwo things we can check say the same as this entry.
Anthropic's documentation agreesAnthropic's documentation has since written up deniedModels, on Deploy managed settings.
Anthropic's release notes agreeAdded deniedModels managed setting to block specific models, even when availableModels allows them
The name it cites is new in this buildNew in this build: deniedModels
