[BUG] /remote-control says "disabled by your organization's policy" while org policy is enabled and a concurrent session on the same machine has RC active

Status Open
Reported on v2.1.232
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 0 comments · opened Sep 23, 2026

Bug Description

/remote-control in one running session returns:

Remote Control is disabled by your organization's policy. Contact your organization admin for access.

At the same moment:

  • The org admin console (Settings → Claude Code) shows Remote Control: ON ("Set by admin"), Cloud sessions: ON, Desktop: ON.
  • Another Claude Code session on the same machine, same account, has Remote Control active (green) right now.

So the org policy, plan, account, and machine are all demonstrably eligible — whatever condition the failing session is hitting, the message misattributes it to org policy, which sends admins chasing settings that are already correct.

Ruled out locally

  • No managed settings override: /Library/Application Support/ClaudeCode/ does not exist on this machine.
  • Nothing remote-control-related in user or project settings.
  • The failing CLI session is authenticated to the same org the admin console shows (verified via the stored oauth account info).
  • Retried /remote-control several minutes apart — same result, so not transient propagation.

Two hypotheses for the real cause

  1. The session holds its policy snapshot from startup and /remote-control never re-fetches — the failing session predates the admin enabling the toggle, while the working session was started after.
  2. The failing session runs as a background job; Remote Control may be ineligible for that session type, but the error still claims org policy.

Expected behavior

Either re-fetch org policy when /remote-control is invoked, or emit an accurate message for the actual condition (e.g. "this session started before Remote Control was enabled for your org — start a new session", or "Remote Control is not available for background sessions"). The current text is actively misleading when policy is enabled.

Environment Info

  • Platform: darwin (macOS, Darwin 25.5.0)
  • Version: 2.1.232

Related: #68775 (closed) reports the same message with no diagnosis; this report adds the enabled-policy + concurrent-working-session contradiction.

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