Claude Code Skips the Parachute and Trump Wants ‘AI’ Banned -- AI Brief October 28

Good day %%first_name%%. Anthropic gave Claude Code a switch for deleting files without asking, and the President wants to ban the word “AI.” Also today: Amazon tells its engineers to stop counting tokens, Goldman’s careful note on AI and hiring, and Airbnb’s AI bouncer for Halloween weekend.

Claude Code Adds a Switch for Deleting Anything The Register

* What happened: Anthropic’s latest Claude Code build, v2.1.311, supports a new environment variable, CLAUDE_CODE_EVEN_MORE_DANGEROUSLY_SKIP_PERMISSIONS, that lets the agent run the file-deleting rm command without asking, The Register reports. Anthropic’s Daisy Hollman announced it, noting that the existing skip-permissions flag “doesn’t actually approve EVERYTHING,” because Claude Code still blocks “some obvious things like rm -rf ~.”

* Why it matters: The Register says rm and rmdir were among the few actions that still triggered a permission prompt even in bypassPermissions mode. This variable removes that last restraint. Back in April we covered An AI Agent Deleted a Startup in 9 Seconds, and The Register notes there are “numerous accounts” of agents issuing commands like rm -rf ~ that wipe drives.

* What everyone’s saying: Some people did not believe it, partly because of the variable’s name and partly because the change is missing from the v2.1.311 changelog, per The Register. Hollman replied, “Not a joke! I hope this helps, and I hope the variable name is memorable.” The Register’s own verdict was drier: “you only live once.”

* My read between the lines: The name is the guardrail. Nobody sets a variable called EVEN_MORE_DANGEROUSLY by accident, so the label does the work a confirmation dialog used to do. Context matters too: The Register says auto mode, which runs background safety checks, became the default in August, so this switch is for people who found even that too many checks. And it notes managed settings may still limit it, which is where company IT teams come in.

Claude Code now has a switch for skipping its last permission prompt. Your Wednesday has plenty of prompts worth skipping too, the harmless kind. Viktor is an AI agent that lives in your Slack and connects to 3,000+ tools, then does the work: reports, dashboards, code and campaigns. Not a chatbot. A coworker. New readers get $50 off their first month. Hire Viktor →

Amazon Tells Engineers to Stop Tokenmaxxing CNBC

* What happened: Amazon posted guidance on its website Tuesday, October 27, that calls token usage, AI-tool adoption rates, and code changes or reviews “deeply flawed” ways to measure how teams use AI, CNBC reports. The memo went around internally in September. “Tokenmaxxing” means pushing AI usage as high as possible, whether or not it produces anything.

* Why it matters: CNBC says companies are grappling with AI’s surging costs and with how to tell whether the technology pays off. Amazon says those metrics can lead to higher costs and too much complexity. Yesterday’s Brief had Bill Gates floating a token tax; today a company is telling its own staff that counting tokens is a bad scoreboard.

* What everyone’s saying: The memo is more balanced than the headline. It stops short of telling staff to ignore the numbers, saying token usage and code generation should be weighed “with care and judgment.” It prefers measuring “long-term outcomes,” and it says that “If your work does not benefit from current AI tooling, that is a finding, not a failing.” It also insists that “AI will be at the center of software engineering practice.”

* My read between the lines: This is Goodhart’s law with a company letterhead: when a measure becomes a target, people hit the target. “A finding, not a failing” is the sentence to frame, because it gives an engineer permission to report that the tool did not help, which is hard to do while adoption numbers are everywhere. The Amazon post and the push to use AI sit in the same document. Read the push as the policy and the metrics warning as the footnote.

📖 Further reading: I found 350,000 tokens hiding in plain sight — Amazon says a big token count tells you little about the work; this is what I found when I audited my own scheduled tasks.

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Trump Vows to Ban the Term “AI” Va