11.1 — What Claude Code sends (and doesn't send)
The first legitimate question when you introduce Claude Code to a team: what data leaves your machine? The answer is transparent and verifiable.
Claude Code is a local client that communicates with the Anthropic API. Three categories of data are sent: your prompts (what you type and the history of the current conversation), the content of files read (only those Claude consults via the Read tool to accomplish a task), and the outputs of executed commands (result of git diff, test output, etc.). This data constitutes the context the model needs to respond.
What is not sent: your entire codebase at startup (no global scan), your system environment variables, your SSH keys, your global configurat