Welcome banner shows stale "What should Claude call you?" value — not refreshed after the setting is changed

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?

The Claude Code welcome banner greets me with "Welcome back Fred!", but "Fred" is my old "What should Claude call you?" value. I changed it to "Frédéric" in my Claude account settings about 1–2 months ago, and the settings page correctly shows the new value (preferred name: Frédéric, full name: Frédéric Côté). Claude Code is still displaying the old, cached name and has never picked up the change — across CLI restarts and version updates.

Note: this is not an accent/encoding issue — the updated value Frédéric renders correctly in account settings. The banner is simply showing a stale value.

What Should Happen?

The banner should reflect the current "What should Claude call you?" value from my account settings — i.e. "Welcome back Frédéric!" — and should update when I change that setting.

Error Messages/Logs

Steps to Reproduce

1. Set "What should Claude call you?" to an initial value (e.g. Fred) in Claude account settings.
2. Use Claude Code — the welcome banner correctly shows Welcome back Fred!.
3. Change "What should Claude call you?" to a new value (e.g. Frédéric) in account settings.
4. Relaunch Claude Code (and/or update to a newer version).
5. The banner still greets you with the OLD value (Welcome back Fred!) instead of the new one (Welcome back Frédéric!).

In my case the change was made ~1–2 months ago and the banner has still never updated.

Claude Model

None

Is this a regression?

I don't know

Last Working Version

_No response_

Claude Code Version

2.1.159 (Claude Code)

Platform

Anthropic API

Operating System

Windows

Terminal/Shell

PowerShell

Additional Information

Root cause (confirmed locally)

The welcome banner reads oauthAccount.displayName from ~/.claude.json (%USERPROFILE%\.claude.json on Windows). On my machine that field is still cached as the old value ("displayName": "Fred") even though I changed "What should Claude call you?" to Frédéric on the web ~1–2 months ago.

oauthAccount.displayName appears to be populated at login only and is never refreshed when the account's preferred name changes server-side — so the banner shows the stale value indefinitely.

Workaround (confirmed working): /logout then /login re-fetches the profile and updates displayName — I ran exactly this and the banner immediately updated to show the correct name. (Manually editing displayName in ~/.claude.json also works.) The real fix would be to refresh the cached oauthAccount profile on startup (or when the preferred name changes), not just at login.

This is a data-staleness / sync bug, not a text-rendering bug: the accented value displays correctly everywhere else.

Related issues

I searched first and found a cluster of welcome-banner issues, but all are closed and locked, and none capture this specific root cause (stale oauthAccount.displayName cached at login):

• #44718 "CLI welcome message shows wrong name" — closest symptom (wrong name despite correct claude.ai profile); closed as duplicate of #36171
• #36171 "preferredName not displayed in greeting banner on macOS" — preferredName from settings.json missing entirely; closed as duplicate of #35956
• #35956 "Startup welcome banner inconsistently truncated in some projects" — whole-banner truncation; closed as duplicate of #25303
• #25303 — banner not visible in some folders (Windows)

These are four distinct mechanisms that were auto-grouped by keyword. This report is filed separately because the root cause here (login-cached oauthAccount.displayName in ~/.claude.json not refreshed on preference change) is different and actionable, and the related issues are locked.

Happy to share account details (display name / email / org) privately if it would help reproduce. Screenshots of the banner and the settings page can be attached on request.

<img width="1088" height="371" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/03483966-5564-40c6-aac5-a1b4065d6827" />
<img width="1439" height="222" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/d316c8ae-19a5-42e7-991b-538a9c5120b3" />