The short answer
● What shipped — Claude Code 2.1.319, 7 November
● Headline change — MCP tool calls that run as tasks go to the background
● New setting — permissions.denyInsteadOfPrompting
● Behaviour change — self-paced /loop now stops when a turn finishes
Anthropic shipped Claude Code 2.1.319 on 7 November. The change most people will notice is that MCP tool calls which run as tasks now move to the background in the terminal, with Claude told the result when they finish. A variable makes them wait instead if you prefer the old behaviour.
Two of the changes are about control rather than speed. A new permissions.denyInsteadOfPrompting setting refuses calls that would otherwise open a permission prompt, which matters for unattended runs. Auto mode also changed when telemetry or feature flags are off, including behind an LLM gateway: unverifiable calls are now asked about or denied outright, with no fallback to the built-in classifier.
The release also adds a /claude-api latency-optimize command, spend reporting in /usage for the Claude apps gateway, pooled-budget conflict rules and JSON log output, plus fixes across permissions, MCP, cloud sessions and the VS Code extension. Self-paced /loop now ends when a turn finishes rather than rescheduling, unless CLAUDE_CODE_LOOP_KEEPALIVE=1 is set.
Sources: Releasebot.
Published 8 November 2026. Every figure above was checked against the reporting linked here on the same day.