Kelvin’s Engineering Wiki

Cloud session

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A cloud session is an ordinary Claude Code session whose machine is not yours: an Anthropic-managed VM that clones your repository from GitHub, keeps running after you close the laptop, and can be picked up later from a browser, a phone, or your own terminal.1 Because the machine is not yours, the code has to come from GitHub (see Claude GitHub App) and network and secrets need their own policy (see Cloud environment).1

Where one can start

SurfaceHow to start
Browserclaude.ai/code (Claude Code on the web)
MobileThe Code tab in the Claude app
Desktop appChoose Cloud instead of Local
Terminalclaude --cloud "<task>"
RoutinesEach scheduled or triggered run is a cloud session

The starting surface changes nothing about how the session runs.1 A session running on your own machine and steered from a phone is Remote Control, a different feature; --remote-control does not create a cloud session.1 Moving work in and out of the cloud is on Moving work between terminal and cloud.

Differences from a local session

  • Commands that produce text work; terminal-only ones such as /plugin and /resume do not. Picker commands such as /model take their value as an argument (/model sonnet), which needs Claude Code v2.1.205+ in the environment.1
  • /compact and /context work; /clear does not, so start a new session instead.1
  • Cloud sessions set CLAUDE_AUTOCOMPACT_PCT_OVERRIDE themselves, and it overrides the same variable in your environment; to change compaction, set CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW instead.1
  • Subagents work as they do locally, and .claude/agents/ definitions are picked up. Agent teams are off unless CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS=1 is set.1
  • To change a setting, set an environment variable on the environment or commit it to .claude/settings.json; /config in the browser only opens the settings panel.1

Lifecycle and sharing

A session expires after inactivity and the VM is reclaimed. Reopening it restores the history on a fresh VM, but background work such as subagents and shell commands is not restored.1 A session also counts as inactive while it waits for you to approve an MCP tool call or sign in to an MCP server.1

Sharing differs by plan: Team and Enterprise choose Private or Team with repository access verification on by default; Pro and Max choose Private or Public (any logged-in claude.ai user) with verification off by default. Sessions can contain private code and credentials, so check before sharing.1

Limits

  • Rate limits are shared with all other Claude usage on the account; there is no separate VM charge.1
  • Cloning and pull requests need GitHub. Other remotes can be sent as a bundle but results cannot be pushed back.1
  • An organization IP allowlist makes Anthropic-hosted sessions fail with an authentication error, because they call the API from Anthropic’s network.1
  • Organizations with Zero Data Retention cannot use cloud sessions.1

Footnotes

  1. Claude Code Cloud Sessions ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13 ↩14 ↩15 ↩16

  2. Claude Projects, Redesigned ↩

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