Claude Code can pick up a login token from a credential file kept at a fixed, well-known location on disk. There are two such readers: one reads a token from a file, and the other reads credentials handed over from another process. Both used to return nothing unless the CLAUDE_CODE_REMOTE environment variable was set. An environment variable is a named value you set in your shell or system before starting a program, and this one marks a session (one run of Claude Code) as running remotely.
That requirement is gone from the reading side. The two readers now skip the file only in these cases:
- Claude Code is running inside a tool server's background process, where it already avoids writing to disk
- the session has no disk storage at all
In any other case, a local session can now read a token from the well-known file. Writing and deleting these credential files still happens only when CLAUDE_CODE_REMOTE is set.
Reading these credential files is no longer limited to remote sessions, so a local session may pick up a token from that file where it previously would have ignored it. If such a file is present on your machine, it can now affect which credentials a local session uses.