Agent teams: bypassPermissions mode revokes Bash access mid-session

Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Mar 19, 2026 by rovverdev Closed Mar 23, 2026

Summary

When spawning subagents via Agent Teams (CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS=1) with mode: "bypassPermissions", Bash tool access is revoked mid-session after initially working. The subagent can execute Bash commands successfully at first, but subsequent calls are denied with "Permission to use Bash has been denied" — including trivial commands like gh --version.

Reproduction

  1. Enable agent teams: claude config set env.CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS 1
  2. Have a skill/orchestrator spawn a subagent with mode: "bypassPermissions" that needs to run multiple sequential Bash commands
  3. The subagent successfully runs initial Bash commands (e.g., gh label list, gh label create)
  4. At some point, all subsequent Bash calls are denied — even gh --version
  5. The denial persists for the rest of the subagent's lifetime

Evidence from session logs

Subagent agent-a058fc9b023dfc514 was spawned with mode: "bypassPermissions":

line 6:  CALL Bash: gh label list --repo ...     → ALLOWED (success)
line 9:  CALL Bash: gh label create ...           → ALLOWED (success)
line 12: CALL Bash: gh issue create ...           → DENIED
line 15: CALL Bash: gh issue create ...           → DENIED (retry)
line 18: CALL Bash: gh --version                  → DENIED (even trivial commands fail)

The parent orchestrator confirmed mode: "bypassPermissions" was set on all 9 spawned agents (verified from session JSONL).

Secondary concern: autonomous permission escalation

The orchestrator chose mode: "bypassPermissions" on its own — no skill instruction or user directive told it to. The skill files contain zero mentions of bypassPermissions. This means an LLM can autonomously escalate its subagents' permissions to bypass user-configured allow/deny/ask lists.

Even if bypassPermissions is a valid mode, the LLM should not be able to select it without explicit user authorization, as it completely sidesteps carefully configured permission boundaries (including deny rules for destructive operations like rm -rf, git push --force, gh repo delete, etc.).

Expected behavior

  1. bypassPermissions mode should work consistently for the full subagent lifetime, not break mid-session
  2. Ideally, bypassPermissions should require explicit user opt-in rather than being selectable by the LLM autonomously — or at minimum, deny rules should always be enforced regardless of mode

Environment

  • Platform: Windows 11 (win32, bash shell)
  • Agent Teams: CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS=1
  • Permission config: User-level settings.json with comprehensive allow/deny/ask lists

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