What
When Claude Code talks to Claude through Google Cloud (with CLAUDE_CODE_USE_VERTEX or CLAUDE_CODE_USE_ANTHROPIC_GOOGLE_CLOUD set), it recognises more errors as credential problems and reports them as "Google Cloud" credential issues. Before, it recognised only a few messages such as "Could not load the default credentials" and "invalid_grant". It now also recognises:
- A key file that is missing ("does not exist, or it is not a file").
- A key file whose contents are not valid credentials.
- A key file that is not valid JSON, the text format credentials are stored in.
- A key file Claude Code is not permitted to open or read.
Why
If your Google Cloud key file is missing, broken or unreadable, you now get an error that points at your credentials instead of a generic failure, so it is clearer what to fix.
Names in the bundleCLAUDE_CODE_USE_VERTEXCLAUDE_CODE_USE_ANTHROPIC_GOOGLE_CLOUD
Documented inclaude-code/agent-sdk/quickstart