Code Review

Set up automated PR reviews that catch logic errors, security vulnerabilities, and regressions using multi-agent analysis of your full codebase

Code Review is in research preview, available for Team and Enterprise subscriptions. It is not available for organizations with Zero Data Retention enabled.

Code Review analyzes your GitHub pull requests and posts findings as inline comments on the lines of code where it found issues. A fleet of specialized agents examine the code changes in the context of your full codebase, looking for logic errors, security vulnerabilities, broken edge cases, and subtle regressions.

Findings are tagged by severity and don’t approve or block your PR, so existing review workflows stay intact. You can tune what Claude flags by adding a CLAUDE.md or REVIEW.md file to your repository.

To run Claude in your own CI infrastructure instead of this managed service, see GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD. For repositories on a self-hosted GitHub instance, see GitHub Enterprise Server.

This page covers:

• How reviews work
• Setup
• Triggering reviews manually with @claude review and @claude review once
• Customizing reviews with CLAUDE.md and REVIEW.md
• Pricing
• Troubleshooting failed runs and missing comments

How reviews work

Once an admin enables Code Review for your organization, reviews trigger when a PR opens, on every push, or when manually requested, depending on the repository’s configured behavior. Commenting @claude review starts reviews on a PR in any mode.

When a review runs, multiple agents analyze the diff and surrounding code in parallel on Anthropic infrastructure. Each agent looks for a different class of issue, then a verification step checks candidates against actual code behavior to filter out false positives. The results are deduplicated, ranked by severity, and posted as inline comments on the specific lines where issues were found. If no issues are found, Claude posts a short confirmation comment on the PR.

Reviews scale in cost with PR size and complexity, completing in 20 minutes on average. Admins can monitor review activity and spend via the analytics dashboard.

Severity levels

Each finding is tagged with a severity level:

Marker	Severity	Meaning
🔴	Important	A bug that should be fixed before merging
🟡	Nit	A minor issue, worth fixing but not blocking
🟣	Pre-existing	A bug that exists in the codebase but was not introduced by this PR

Findings include a collapsible extended reasoning section you can expand to understand why Claude flagged the issue and how it verified the problem.

Check run output

Beyond the inline review comments, each review populates the Claude Code Review check run that appears alongside your CI checks. Expand its Details link to see a summary of every finding in one place, sorted by severity:

Severity	File:Line	Issue
🔴 Important	src/auth/session.ts:142	Token refresh races with logout, leaving stale sessions active
🟡 Nit	src/auth/session.ts:88	parseExpiry silently returns 0 on malformed input

Each finding also appears as an annotation in the Files changed tab, marked directly on the relevant diff lines. Important findings render with a red marker, nits with a yellow warning, and pre-existing bugs with a gray notice. Annotations and the severity table are written to the check run independently of inline review comments, so they remain available even if GitHub rejects an inline comment on a line that moved.

The check run always completes with a neutral conclusion so it never blocks merging through branch protection rules. If you want to gate merges on Code Review findings, read the severity breakdown from the check run output in your own CI. The last line of the Details text is a machine-readable comment your workflow can parse with gh and jq:

gh api repos/OWNER/REPO/check-runs/CHECK_RUN_ID \
  --jq '.output.text | split("bughunter-severity: ")[1] | split(" -->")[0] | fromjson'

This returns a JSON object with counts per severity, for example {"normal": 2, "nit": 1, "pre_existing": 0}. The normal key holds the count of Important findings; a non-zero value means Claude found at least one bug worth fixing before merge.

What Code Review checks

By default, Code Review focuses on correctness: bugs that would break production, not formatting preferences or missing test coverage. You can expand what it checks by adding guidance files to your repository.

Set up Code Review

An admin enables Code Review once for the organization and selects which repositories to include.

1. Open Claude Code admin settings

   Go to claude.ai/admin-settings/claude-code and find the Code Review section. You need admin access to your Claude organization and permission to install GitHub Apps in your GitHub organization.

2. Start setup

   Click Setup. This begins the GitHub App installation flow.

3. Install the Claude GitHub App

   Follow the prompts to install the Claude GitHub App to your GitHub organization. The app requests these repository permissions:

   • Contents: read and write
   • Issues: read and write
   • Pull requests: read and write

   Code Review uses read access to contents and write access to pull requests. The broader permission set also supports GitHub Actions if you enable that later.

4. Select repositories

   Choose which repositories to enable for Code Review. If you don’t see a repository, make sure you gave the Claude GitHub App access to it during installation. You can add more repositories later.

5. Set review triggers per repo

   After setup completes, the Code Review section shows your repositories in a table. For each repository, use the Review Behavior dropdown to choose when reviews run:

   • Once after PR creation: review runs once when a PR is opened or marked ready for review
   • After every push: review runs on every push to the PR branch, catching new issues as the PR evolves and auto-resolving threads when you fix flagged issues
   • Manual: reviews start only when someone comments @claude review or @claude review once on a PR; @claude review also subscribes the PR to reviews on subsequent pushes

   Reviewing on every push runs the most reviews and costs the most. Manual mode is useful for high-traffic repos where you want to opt specific PRs into review, or to only start reviewing your PRs once they’re ready.

The repositories table also shows the average cost per review for each repo based on recent activity. Use the row actions menu to turn Code Review on or off per repository, or to remove a repository entirely.

To verify setup, open a test PR. If you chose an automatic trigger, a check run named Claude Code Review appears within a few minutes. If you chose Manual, comment @claude review on the PR to start the first review. If no check run appears, confirm the repository is listed in your admin settings and the Claude GitHub App has access to it.

Manually trigger reviews

Two comment commands start a review on demand. Both work regardless of the repository’s configured trigger, so you can use them to opt specific PRs into review in Manual mode or to get an immediate re-review in other modes.

Command	What it does
@claude review	Starts a review and subscribes the PR to push-triggered reviews going forward
@claude review once	Starts a single review without subscribing the PR to future pushes

Use @claude review once when you want feedback on the current state of a PR but don’t want every subsequent push to incur a review. This is useful for long-running PRs with frequent pushes, or when you want a one-off second opinion without changing the PR’s review behavior.

For either command to trigger a review:

• Post it as a top-level PR comment, not an inline comment on a diff line
• Put the command at the start of the comment, with once on the same line if you’re using the one-shot form
• You must have owner, member, or collaborator access to the repository
• The PR must be open

Unlike automatic triggers, manual triggers run on draft PRs, since an explicit request signals you want the review now regardless of draft status.

If a review is already running on that PR, the request is queued until the in-progress review completes. You can monitor progress via the check run on the PR.

Customize reviews

Code Review reads two files from your repository to guide what it flags. Both are additive on top of the default correctness checks:

• CLAUDE.md: shared project instructions that Claude Code uses for all tasks, not just reviews. Use it when guidance also applies to interactive Claude Code sessions.
• REVIEW.md: review-only guidance, read exclusively during code reviews. Use it for rules that are strictly about what to flag or skip during review and would clutter your general CLAUDE.md.

CLAUDE.md

Code Review reads your repository’s CLAUDE.md files and treats newly-introduced violations as nit-level findings. This works bidirectionally: if your PR changes code in a way that makes a CLAUDE.md statement outdated, Claude flags that the docs need updating too.

Claude reads CLAUDE.md files at every level of your directory hierarchy, so rules in a subdirectory’s CLAUDE.md apply only to files under that path. See the memory documentation for more on how CLAUDE.md works.

For review-specific guidance that you don’t want applied to general Claude Code sessions, use REVIEW.md instead.

REVIEW.md

Add a REVIEW.md file to your repository root for review-specific rules. Use it to encode:

• Company or team style guidelines: “prefer early returns over nested conditionals”
• Language- or framework-specific conventions not covered by linters
• Things Claude should always flag: “any new API route must have an integration test”
• Things Claude should skip: “don’t comment on formatting in generated code under /gen/”

Example REVIEW.md:

# Code Review Guidelines

## Always check
- New API endpoints have corresponding integration tests
- Database migrations are backward-compatible
- Error messages don't leak internal details to users

## Style
- Prefer `match` statements over chained `isinstance` checks
- Use structured logging, not f-string interpolation in log calls

## Skip
- Generated files under `src/gen/`
- Formatting-only changes in `*.lock` files

Claude auto-discovers REVIEW.md at the repository root. No configuration needed.

View usage

Go to claude.ai/analytics/code-review to see Code Review activity across your organization. The dashboard shows:

Section	What it shows
PRs reviewed	Daily count of pull requests reviewed over the selected time range
Cost weekly	Weekly spend on Code Review
Feedback	Count of review comments that were auto-resolved because a developer addressed the issue
Repository breakdown	Per-repo counts of PRs reviewed and comments resolved

The repositories table in admin settings also shows average cost per review for each repo.

Pricing

Code Review is billed based on token usage. Each review averages $15-25 in cost, scaling with PR size, codebase complexity, and how many issues require verification. Code Review usage is billed separately through extra usage and does not count against your plan’s included usage.

The review trigger you choose affects total cost:

• Once after PR creation: runs once per PR
• After every push: runs on each push, multiplying cost by the number of pushes
• Manual: no reviews until someone comments @claude review on a PR

In any mode, commenting @claude review opts the PR into push-triggered reviews, so additional cost accrues per push after that comment. To run a single review without subscribing to future pushes, comment @claude review once instead.

Costs appear on your Anthropic bill regardless of whether your organization uses AWS Bedrock or Google Vertex AI for other Claude Code features. To set a monthly spend cap for Code Review, go to claude.ai/admin-settings/usage and configure the limit for the Claude Code Review service.

Monitor spend via the weekly cost chart in analytics or the per-repo average cost column in admin settings.

Troubleshooting

Review runs are best-effort. A failed run never blocks your PR, but it also doesn’t retry on its own. This section covers how to recover from a failed run and where to look when the check run reports issues you can’t find.

Retrigger a failed or timed-out review

When the review infrastructure hits an internal error or exceeds its time limit, the check run completes with a title of Code review encountered an error or Code review timed out. The conclusion is still neutral, so nothing blocks your merge, but no findings are posted.

To run the review again, comment @claude review once on the PR. This starts a fresh review without subscribing the PR to future pushes. If the PR is already subscribed to push-triggered reviews, pushing a new commit also starts a new review.

The Re-run button in GitHub’s Checks tab does not retrigger Code Review. Use the comment command or a new push instead.

Find issues that aren’t showing as inline comments

If the check run title says issues were found but you don’t see inline review comments on the diff, look in these other locations where findings are surfaced:

• Check run Details: click Details next to the Claude Code Review check in the Checks tab. The severity table lists every finding with its file, line, and summary regardless of whether the inline comment was accepted.
• Files changed annotations: open the Files changed tab on the PR. Findings render as annotations attached directly to the diff lines, separate from review comments.
• Review body: if you pushed to the PR while a review was running, some findings may reference lines that no longer exist in the current diff. Those appear under an Additional findings heading in the review body text rather than as inline comments.

Related resources

Code Review is designed to work alongside the rest of Claude Code. If you want to run reviews locally before opening a PR, need a self-hosted setup, or want to go deeper on how CLAUDE.md shapes Claude’s behavior across tools, these pages are good next stops:

• Plugins: browse the plugin marketplace, including a code-review plugin for running on-demand reviews locally before pushing
• GitHub Actions: run Claude in your own GitHub Actions workflows for custom automation beyond code review
• GitLab CI/CD: self-hosted Claude integration for GitLab pipelines
• Memory: how CLAUDE.md files work across Claude Code
• Analytics: track Claude Code usage beyond code review