Anthropic released Claude Code 2.1.319 on November 6. The headline change is MCP tasks in the terminal: when an MCP server runs a tool call as a task, Claude Code now moves it to the background right away and tells Claude the result when it finishes, instead of leaving the session sitting inside the call. A new environment variable, CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_MCP_TASK_BACKGROUND, restores the old wait-inside-the-call behaviour.

The release also targets unattended runs. A new setting, permissions.denyInsteadOfPrompting, denies a tool call that would normally stop and wait for a permission prompt and lets the turn carry on, in terminal sessions, subagents and agent teams. Auto mode tightens at the same time: when telemetry or feature flags are off, including behind LLM gateways, calls the server cannot check are now asked about or denied with no fallback to the built-in classifier.

The changelog rounds out with a /claude-api latency-optimize command and fixes for several permission-check bypasses, including a crafted environment prefix in Bash and a sandbox escape during worktree creation. Reporting on the release notes that MCP tasks are a terminal feature — the VS Code extension and the desktop app do not have them.