[BUG] DISABLE_AUTOUPDATER=1 not being honored

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing issues and this hasn't been reported yet
• [x] This is a single bug report (please file separate reports for different bugs)
• [x] I am using the latest version of Claude Code

What's Wrong?

I've been using 2.0.71 because of an output bug on Windows in 2.0.73. I set DISABLE_AUTOUPDATER=1 so that Claude would not auto-update to the buggy version. This morning, I found that it had updated anyway. I asked Claude about it, and got this (only partly legible) response:

You seem to have auto-updated to 2.0.73, I thought I turned auto-updates off?

● claude-code-guide(Research Claude Code auto-update settings)
⎿  Done (2 tool uses · 20.4k tokens · 12s)

ation, you do have auto-updates disabled correctly in your settings.json:

{
"env": {
"DISABLE_AUTOUPDATER": "1"
}

have been respected:

What Should Happen?

Claude should not have updated itself.

Error Messages/Logs

Steps to Reproduce

1. Create settings.json file in ~/.claude, with DISABLE_AUTOUPDATER set to 1:

{
"env": {
"DISABLE_AUTOUPDATER": "1",
"CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC": "1"
}
}

1. run Claude for a while, then exit
2. Next morning, Claude was updated to 2.0.73

Claude Model

Opus

Is this a regression?

I don't know

Last Working Version

_No response_

Claude Code Version

2.0.71 upgraded to 2.0.73

Platform

Anthropic API

Operating System

Windows

Terminal/Shell

Windows Terminal

Additional Information

_No response_