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Claude Code adds pooled team budgets and a subagent effort control

Admins can now give a group one shared monthly spend cap on top of each member's own limit, and a new environment variable sets how much effort subagents use by default.

Source: Anthropic

Claude Code’s 2.1.316 release, out on 31 October, adds pooled group budgets to the Claude apps gateway. A group’s members can now share one monthly budget on top of each member’s own individual limit, set with pooled_budget on the spend limits admin API. Before this, keeping a team’s Claude Code spend in check meant tracking each person’s cap on its own.

The same release adds CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_EFFORT, an environment variable that sets the reasoning effort subagents run at by default, instead of them inheriting whatever effort the parent session is using:

export CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_EFFORT=low

There’s also a CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ULTRATHINK variable to turn the ultrathink keyword off entirely, and in VS Code that keyword now runs at xhigh effort with the same rainbow highlight the terminal already showed.

Why it matters: the pooled budget is a real gap closed for anyone running Claude Code across a team, where a shared cap is often more useful than policing individual limits. The subagent effort variable matters too: if your workflows fan out into several subagents, you can now tune their cost and quality independently of the main session rather than paying for the parent’s effort level everywhere.

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