Claude Code Cloud Sessions, Explained

Published October 3, 2026 · by the AQ team

A Claude Code cloud session is a Claude Code session that runs on cloud infrastructure instead of your machine: by default an isolated virtual machine Anthropic manages, or your organization's self-hosted environment when routed there. Anthropic moved cloud sessions out of research preview on September 23, 2026, about a year after the feature first appeared as "Claude Code on the web" in October 2025. They are included with Pro, Max, and Team plans and with Enterprise premium seats, and start from claude.ai/code in a browser, the Code tab of the Claude mobile app, the desktop app with Cloud selected, or the terminal with the claude --cloud flag. The session keeps running after you close your laptop, and you can check on it or steer it from any device. This guide covers what runs where, what persists, how sessions move between cloud and terminal, and how cloud sessions compare with Claude Code Projects and with a VM you manage.

What is a Claude Code cloud session?

Mechanically, submitting a cloud task does four things, per Anthropic's documentation as of October 2026. Your repository is cloned fresh from GitHub into an isolated VM (no local checkout needed). An optional setup script runs, cached as a filesystem snapshot when it finishes in roughly five minutes so later sessions skip it. Network access comes from the session's cloud environment, a saved configuration with four levels: None, Trusted (a default allowlist of package registries and similar domains), Full, and Custom (your own allowlist). Claude then works on its own branch, and at a stopping point pushes it to GitHub; you review the diff, leave inline comments, create a PR, or keep going in the same conversation.

Two custody details are worth knowing. Your GitHub credentials never enter the session's VM: git operations go through a proxy that attaches the credential server side. And even with network access set to None, the session still talks to the Anthropic API, which Anthropic's own docs note "may allow data to exit the VM."

GitHub is effectively required. Private repositories need either the Claude GitHub App installed or a GitHub CLI token sent via the /web-setup command. A repository with no GitHub remote can be bundled and uploaded from your machine (under 100 MB), but the session cannot push results back to a GitLab or Bitbucket remote. Organizations with Zero Data Retention enabled cannot use cloud sessions at all.

How to start a cloud session from the terminal

The CLI flag creates a new cloud session from your current repository's GitHub remote at your current branch (not your local checkout, so push local commits first):

# One task in the cloud while you keep working locally
claude --cloud "Fix the flaky test in auth.spec.ts"

# Each invocation is its own independent session and branch
claude --cloud "Update the API documentation"
claude --cloud "Refactor the logger to use structured output"

# Send a follow-up message into a running session, from any machine
claude -p "also update the changelog" --cloud session_01Di...

The older --remote spelling still works as a deprecated alias. Cloud sessions support three permission modes (Plan, Accept edits, and Auto, where a classifier reviews actions instead of asking you); the Manual and Bypass modes from the terminal do not exist there.

What persists after you close the laptop

Closing the tab or the laptop does not stop the session: it keeps working until the current task is done, then idles. From there the lifecycle has two stages, and the difference matters for long tasks. After a few minutes of inactivity the VM pauses with its files saved, and reopening the session resumes it. A paused VM can later be reclaimed entirely ("environment expired"). Reopening then provisions a fresh VM with your conversation history restored, but background work that was running when the VM went away, such as shell commands and subagents, is not restored, and the working tree starts over from a fresh clone. The practical rule Anthropic's docs point to: have the session commit and push anything you want to keep. Work that only exists on the VM's disk has a lifetime you do not control. (A session idling on a question for you survives the same way: you can answer when you come back, up to that environment expiry.)

Moving a session between cloud and terminal

Handoff from the CLI is one way: you can pull a cloud session down, but you cannot push an existing terminal session up (the desktop app's "Continue in" menu can send a local session to the cloud). Pulling down is called teleporting: claude --teleport opens a session picker or resumes a specific session ID, checking out the session's branch and loading the conversation. It requires a clean checkout of the same repository, the branch pushed to the remote, and the same claude.ai account. One subtlety: the terminal gets its own copy of the conversation, so new work there stays local, and the two copies diverge from that moment.

Cloud sessions, Projects, and your own VM

Three ways of running Claude Code away from a laptop are easy to conflate, as of October 2026:

A cloud session is the worker unit: one task, one branch, one VM. Claude Code Projects is the layer above it, a persistent conversation where Claude scopes work into threads, each a full cloud session. And running the CLI yourself on a server, covered in running Claude Code on a cloud VM and keeping Claude Code running after closing your laptop, gets the same laptop independence with a different trade: you operate the machine, and in exchange the session runs inside your network with your tools, no GitHub requirement, every permission mode, and a working tree that lives as long as the disk does rather than until a VM is reclaimed. Anthropic's own quickstart draws the line the same way: cloud sessions fit parallel, well-defined tasks and repos you do not have locally; work that needs your local config, tools, or environment fits a local session.

Usage limits and the one-time credit

There is no separate compute charge for the cloud VM. Cloud sessions draw on the same rate limits as the rest of your Claude and Claude Code usage, and parallel sessions consume them proportionately faster, so a burst of --cloud tasks lands on the same budget your terminal does. Claude Code usage limits, explained covers how those windows work.

The launch promotion is dated and specific: individual Pro and Max subscribers active when it began on September 23, 2026 get a one-time credit ($100 on Pro, $250 on Max), claimed by October 7, 2026, with any unused balance expiring on November 4. The credit sits outside normal plan limits and applies to cloud sessions, so hitting your local limit does not stop a credited cloud task; when it runs out, cloud usage counts against plan limits again.

Where AQ fits

AQ is the multiplayer coding harness where engineering teams run AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex together: shared live terminals, a code editor, and app previews, in your own cloud. The honest comparison with cloud sessions is about three defaults. First, infrastructure: a cloud session runs on an Anthropic-managed VM, while AQ workspaces run on a VM your team connects from its own cloud or a dedicated always-on AQ-managed VM in its own isolated network, with no shared multi-tenant execution tier. Second, the agent: a cloud session runs Claude Code, while an AQ workspace runs whichever real CLI the task calls for (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor Agent, Kimi, Grok, or a plain shell) in a persistent tmux session, streamed live to the browser, surviving a closed laptop and resuming from any device, with each engineer signed into their own Claude or OpenAI account, which AQ never marks up. Third, visibility: a shared cloud session link shows the latest state when opened, while teammates in AQ open the same workspace and watch the same live session as it runs, and the owner can hand over typing by approving a control request in one click. Each workspace gets an isolated git worktree, agents commit and open PRs with per-user GitHub auth, and every workspace serves a live dev-server preview with shareable links that work without an account for viewing. The Free plan is a personal sandbox on a private machine AQ creates, with no time limit; the Team plan is $50 per user per month in early access (standard $200, billed monthly), rate locked for your first 12 months. AQ vs Claude Code on the web takes the comparison feature by feature.

Plainly: for solo, well-scoped tasks on GitHub repositories, cloud sessions are now a first-class part of a Claude subscription and worth using, especially before the credit deadline. A team workspace earns its place when you want the same always-on sessions across every agent CLI you use, on infrastructure you control, with the live session itself as the thing your team shares.