Shopify’s CEO threatened to ban Claude Code over AGENTS.md

The New Stack reported on 25 August 2026 that Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke said he is thinking about banning Claude Code at Shopify until it reads AGENTS.md and .agents/skills.

Lütke posted on X on 25 August that insisting on CLAUDE.md only can cause split-brain problems when different people use different tools. In a follow-up he said agent and Claude files are applied recursively through Shopify’s monorepo, and that a missing file in one directory can leave some developers working with incomplete instructions. Shopify already automates around that, which he called a complexity tax that should not have to be paid.

Claude Code reads CLAUDE.md natively, not AGENTS.md. Anthropic documents workarounds such as importing AGENTS.md from CLAUDE.md or using symbolic links. The New Stack said developers have asked for native AGENTS.md support for nearly a year, and that a request for recursive AGENTS.md discovery was closed as not planned.

OpenAI introduced AGENTS.md in August 2025. By December, OpenAI said it was used by more than 60,000 open-source projects, with support from Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, Jules, and VS Code, and later handed the format to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation.

Source: Shopify’s CEO threatened to ban Claude Code. Anthropic had already closed the feature request, The New Stack, 25 August 2026.