Claude Code's AGENTS.md support switches off silently when telemetry is off

Claude Code 2.1.277 said that in a project with no CLAUDE.md it would read AGENTS.md instead. Szypowicz found the loader is a built-in plugin whose availability depends on a remote feature flag, tengu_agents_md_mod, with false as the fallback. He tested it with a canary word in an otherwise empty directory. With DISABLE_TELEMETRY or CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC set, even to 0, the file never loaded. Clearing both variables in a project's .claude/settings.json had no effect. No run printed a warning. "The silence is the worst part," he writes. The GitHub issue his post builds on, opened September 20, says gateways, Bedrock and Vertex hit the same gate; Anthropic's 2.1.277 note had already said the feature was not yet on Bedrock, Vertex or Foundry.

His workaround does not touch the flag. A one-line CLAUDE.md containing @AGENTS.md imports the file, and his canary test passed with nonessential traffic still disabled.

On Hacker News the post had 206 points and 77 comments about two hours after it went up. There, mpoteat, writing as the engineer responsible ("a fully human error on my part"), called the gate "a rollout artifact": a remote kill switch in case the feature broke something, and "with telemetry off you don't get those." He added: "It's already been fixed as part of v2.1.281 releasing today." We could not confirm his affiliation or the fix. The newest entry in the public changelog was still 2.1.280 when we checked.

Why it matters: When we covered 2.1.277 on September 19, we said a team keeping a second instruction file only for Claude Code could drop it. For anyone running with telemetry off, that advice did not hold: the agent worked without its project instructions and gave no sign of it. Keep the @AGENTS.md import until you have upgraded and confirmed the file loads. A canary word in the instruction file is a cheap test worth keeping in any setup that depends on one.