What's new in Claude

Enhanced auto mode safety by blocking destructive git and infrastructure commands unless explicitly requested; added model deprecation warnings; fixed thinking block handling, WebSearch in subagents, and terminal cursor management.

Added /config key=value syntax for inline settings, Apple Events sandbox opt-in for macOS automation, and improved streaming stability with auto-retry on transient failures.

Fixed mid-stream connection drops, mouse-wheel scrolling in WSL2, and improved sandbox glob performance for large repos.

/cd command — move the current session to a new working directory mid-conversation without rebuilding the prompt cache.

Sub-agents spawning sub-agents — background agent chains are now supported up to five levels deep, enabling complex multi-layer orchestration.

--safe-mode — starts Claude Code with all customizations disabled (hooks, plugins, MCP servers) for clean troubleshooting without side effects.

fallbackModel — configure up to three fallback models tried in order when the primary model is unavailable or rate-limited.

Claude Sonnet 4 (claude-sonnet-4-20250514) and Claude Opus 4 (claude-opus-4-20250514) are retired — all requests now return an error. Upgrade to Sonnet 4.6 or Opus 4.8.

Code execution tool now discloses the 90-second per-cell time limit so Claude can budget long-running cells; web search and web fetch tools gain a response_inclusion parameter to drop consumed result blocks from agentic API responses.

Claude Fable 5 launched — Anthropic's most capable widely released model: 1M token context, 128k max output, always-on adaptive thinking, and a new stop_reason: "refusal" with zero billing on pre-generation blocks. Claude Managed Agents also gained scheduled deployments and vault env-var credentials.

Claude Opus 4.1 deprecated with retirement on August 5, 2026 — migrate to Claude Opus 4.8.

Security-guidance plugin shipped to the plugin marketplace — reviews Claude's changes for vulnerabilities as it works. Claude Code weekly limits raised 50% through July 13, 2026 across all plans.

Claude Fable 5 is live — Anthropic's most capable generally available model, scoring 10%+ higher than Opus 4.8 on key benchmarks. Claude Design update also landed with imported design systems, canvas editing, and /design-sync with Claude Code.

Boris Cherny (Claude Code creator) hasn't written a line of code himself in 2026 — shared his surprisingly vanilla Claude Code setup at Code with Claude: Extended Tokyo, noting "there is no one correct way" to use it.

Thariq Shihipar published "We're turning Todos into Tasks in Claude Code" — outlining the new TaskCreate/TaskOutput architecture replacing the old TODO-based workflow tracking system.