Claude Code skips AGENTS.md whenever it cannot fetch a remote flag, and nothing on Anthropic's pages says that is fixed.
Claude Code 2.1.277 added AGENTS.md as a fallback when a project has no CLAUDE.md. The loader is a built-in plugin whose availability is decided by a remote feature flag, with false as the fallback. Set DISABLE_TELEMETRY or CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC — to any value, including 0 — and the file is never read, with no warning.1
The reporter's canary test also found that clearing the variables in a project's .claude/settings.json has no effect. A second reporter on the issue says the file is skipped in the first session after install even with telemetry on, because the flag is not cached yet — which is every fresh CI runner.2 Bedrock, Vertex and gateway users hit the same path, since the flag cannot resolve there.1
The v2.1.281 release notes, published at 19:19 UTC, list no AGENTS.md change, and issue #95690 was still open when we read it at 06:00.23
Do not rely on native AGENTS.md loading yet. Put a one-line CLAUDE.md containing @AGENTS.md next to it; @ imports do not depend on the flag.1
The gate, and the one override that works
var W = !1; // isOnByDefault: false
var B = () => Oa("tengu_agents_md_mod", W); // isAvailable: remote flag, fallback falseExcerpt from the 2.1.280 bundle as printed by the reporter.1 A session-level claude --settings '{"env":{"DISABLE_TELEMETRY":"","CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC":""}}' works from the second session on, which is no help on an ephemeral runner.
One commenter on the issue notes that DO_NOT_TRACK is the variable that reads as a boolean; the two above treat any non-empty value as on. We have not tested that ourselves.