Shopify CEO considers banning Claude Code over file format dispute

Shopify ↗ 3.59% CEO Tobi Lütke said on Monday he is considering banning Claude Code across the company because Anthropic's AI coding tool refuses to natively read AGENTS.md files, a widely adopted convention for giving AI agents project-specific instructions.

"I'm thinking about banning Claude code at Shopify until they change their mind and read AGENTS.md and .agents/skills etc.," Lütke posted on X. "Insisting on only reading CLAUDE.md sometimes leads to split brain problems when different team members use different tools. Just unnecessary."x

The "Complexity Tax"

The dispute centers on how AI coding agents receive context about a project's build commands, coding conventions, and directory structure. AGENTS.md, introduced by OpenAI in August 2025 and later handed to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, has become an industry-wide standard used by more than 60,000 open-source projects. Tools including Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code all support it.daily

Claude Code, however, relies on its own CLAUDE.md format and does not natively read AGENTS.md files. In a large monorepo like Shopify's, where thousands of developers use different AI tools, this creates what Lütke described as a "lobotomy" for developers whose directories contain AGENTS.md but lack the Claude-specific equivalent. Teams are forced to build extra automation to bridge the gap, adding what amounts to a complexity tax on engineering workflows.daily

Anthropic's Closed Door

The friction is not new. A GitHub feature request asking Anthropic to support AGENTS.md dates back to August 2025 and has accumulated thousands of upvotes. But Anthropic closed the request as "not planned," even as the standard gained broad adoption across the industry.reddit+2

Anthropic has pointed to workarounds, such as importing AGENTS.md content into a CLAUDE.md file or creating symbolic links. But for organizations operating at Shopify's scale, those workarounds amount to the very overhead Lütke is objecting to.github+1

An Industry Watching

The standoff highlights a growing tension in the AI tooling ecosystem: whether vendors will adopt shared conventions or maintain proprietary formats that lock users into their platforms. With AGENTS.md now governed by a Linux Foundation body and supported by most major AI coding tools, Claude Code's holdout position has become increasingly conspicuous. Whether Lütke follows through on his threat — or whether Anthropic reconsiders — could set a precedent for how interoperability standards are negotiated in the fast-moving AI developer tools market.