Plugin uninstall reports success but does not persist — plugin keeps loading skills and MCP servers into new sessions

Summary

Uninstalling a plugin from claude.ai → Customize → Plugins shows a success toast, removes the row, and renders the list empty — but the plugin is still installed. A full page reload restores it, and it continues to load its skills and MCP servers into new Claude Code sessions.

This reproduced on 2 of 9 plugins. The other 7 uninstalled cleanly and have stayed gone, so this is not a general failure of the uninstall path.

Environment

• claude.ai web (Customize → Plugins), Claude Code desktop app on macOS 15.5
• Plugins affected: Data (10 skills) and Enterprise Search (5 skills), both @knowledge-work-plugins, author Anthropic
• Uninstalled cleanly on the same account, same sitting: PDF Viewer, Adobe for Creativity, Operations, Engineering, Sales, Productivity, Marketing

Steps to reproduce

1. claude.ai → Customize → Plugins
2. Click the Data row → ⋮ → Uninstall → confirm
3. Observe: toast "Data has been uninstalled", row disappears, list renders empty
4. Hard-reload the page, reopen Customize → Plugins

Expected

Data is uninstalled and absent after reload.

Actual

Data is present again. Repeating the flow reproduces it every time.

• Data: 3 uninstall attempts (2026-08-03), all reported success, all reverted
• Enterprise Search: 2 attempts, same
• Identical behaviour whether clicked manually or driven programmatically — not a client-side click/timing problem
• Still installed 24+ hours later (verified 2026-08-04), so this is not propagation delay

Additional evidence

The uninstall partially writes. The Last updated column for both plugins changed from 7/24/26 to 8/3/26 — the date of the uninstall attempts. Something is written to the record; the removal is not.

The plugins keep loading into new sessions. A fresh Claude Code session started after the uninstalls reports:

• data: — 10 skills (analyze, build-dashboard, create-viz, data-context-extractor, data-visualization, explore-data, sql-queries, statistical-analysis, validate-data, write-query)
• enterprise-search: — 5 skills (digest, knowledge-synthesis, search, search-strategy, source-management)
• 10 of its 11 auth-required MCP servers belong to these two: plugin:data:{amplitude, amplitude-eu, atlassian, bigquery, definite, hex} and plugin:enterprise-search:{asana, guru, notion, slack}

Control — the same account propagates other changes correctly. In the same sitting, 8 connectors were disconnected. Those propagated (some within minutes, the rest overnight), and the account's remote-MCP manifest went from 11 servers to exactly the 4 intended. So the account is not globally stuck on writes; the failure is specific to these plugin uninstalls.

Impact

Low severity, but the failure is silent and the success signal is misleading — the UI gives no indication anything went wrong, so a user reasonably believes the plugin is gone. Practical cost here is 15 unwanted skills and 10 uncallable MCP servers loaded into every session.

Not yet tried

The per-plugin Enable toggle on the plugin detail page — it may suppress loading even when the uninstall write fails. Worth knowing whether that is a viable workaround.