A developer asked Anthropic’s Claude Code to read AGENTS.md, a plain-text file format that other AI coding tools already accept. Anthropic declined to implement the change for 361 days, and ultimately closed the request as “completed” without delivering any functional update.
What changed and when
A tangible change arrived only after Shopify’s CEO publicly suggested he might move his purchase order elsewhere. Anthropic released a fix 24 days after that comment, but the delivered solution was smaller than what had been promised, and several of the largest companies were deliberately excluded from the update.
Why this matters
This episode shows that access to features — even something as simple as reading a named text file — can be treated as commercial leverage rather than a purely technical decision. According to the reporting, one customer with a bill Anthropic was willing to risk losing succeeded where a year of other requests had not.
What was delivered, and who was left out
The fix that eventually shipped did not match the scope of the original promise. Its reduced scope and the intentional omission of major customers indicate the company reframed the issue as one of pricing and selective access rather than universal compatibility.
Implications
When high-value customers are involved, companies may prioritize business negotiations over uniform feature rollout. Public signals from influential customers — such as a CEO indicating possible procurement changes — can accelerate response timelines in ways that repeated community requests do not.
Source and availability
The detailed timeline and analysis were originally published as paywalled material by AI Secret; the investigation is currently available for free access and recounts the entire 361-day sequence in depth.
