CLAUDE.md parent directory traversal is a security/privacy concern

[rdewaele]

Problem

Claude Code recursively walks up the directory tree from the working directory to / and reads every CLAUDE.md it finds. This behavior is not configurable.

This is a security and privacy concern:

1. Unintended context leakage: Starting Claude Code in ~/projects/foo/bar/ silently loads CLAUDE.md from ~/projects/foo/, ~/projects/, ~/, etc. — directories the user never explicitly pointed Claude at. In a workspace with multiple unrelated projects under a shared parent, this leaks instructions and context from one project into another.

2. No user awareness: There is no indication that parent CLAUDE.md files were loaded. The user has no way to know that files outside their working directory are influencing Claude's behavior.

3. No opt-out: The traversal is hardcoded. There is no setting to disable or limit it.

Expected behavior

At minimum, provide a configuration option to control this behavior. Possible approaches:

• A setting to disable parent directory traversal entirely (only load CLAUDE.md from the working directory)
• A setting to limit traversal to the git repository root
• A setting to set an explicit boundary (e.g., stop at a specific directory)
• Display which CLAUDE.md files were loaded at startup so the user is aware

Current behavior

Claude Code unconditionally recurses from cwd up to (but not including) /, loading every CLAUDE.md and CLAUDE.local.md it encounters.

[github-actions]

Found 3 possible duplicate issues:

1. [FEATURE] Provide way to exclude parent CLAUDE.md files from auto-loading in subdirectories #20880
2. [FEATURE] stop_traversal directive for CLAUDE.md #26069
3. [FEATURE] Claude Code memory traversal should respect git worktree boundaries #16600

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[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically closed as a duplicate of #20880.

If this is incorrect, please re-open this issue or create a new one.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically locked since it was closed and has not had any activity for 7 days. If you're experiencing a similar issue, please file a new issue and reference this one if it's relevant.