Claude Code Review Levels: Quick, Standard and Deep

Claude Code's Code Review is a service that has Claude read the proposed changes in your GitHub repositories and look for bugs. It now lets you choose how hard it looks. Since Claude Code version 2.1.304, released on 19 October 2026, each review runs at one of three levels: Quick, Standard or Deep. If you are asking "how thorough should my AI code review be, and what does it cost?", this is the new dial.

A second change arrived in the same release: an owner can switch reviews on for every repository in a GitHub organization in one step.

What is Claude Code Review?

A pull request is a proposed change to a project. Someone (or an AI agent) asks the team to merge it into the main code. Code Review, from Anthropic, reads each of these changes.

According to Anthropic's documentation, several agents read the change together with the code around it, looking for problems such as logic errors, security vulnerabilities and broken edge cases. A separate verification step then checks the candidate findings against the code and filters out false alarms. What remains is ranked by severity and posted as comments on the exact lines, with a summary in the review and a status check (a pass-or-fail style marker GitHub shows on the pull request). That check never reports a failure.

Three limits are worth knowing:

• A review never approves or blocks a change. The decision to merge stays with your team.
• It works by reading the code. It does not build or run it.
• Anthropic itself warns that it may miss bugs and security problems, so a review with no findings does not mean the code is free of errors or secure.

By default it focuses on correctness: bugs that would break production, not formatting preferences or missing tests.

The service is available on Team and Enterprise plans, for repositories hosted on GitHub. Anyone on any plan can still run a review from their own Claude Code session with the /code-review command.

What changed on 19 October 2026?

The Claude Code changelog for version 2.1.304 lists two additions under Code Review:

1. Review levels. Owners choose Quick, Standard (the default) or Deep for the organization, and can give individual repositories their own level.
2. Whole-organization coverage. An option in the admin settings to review every repository in a GitHub organization, including ones added later, without selecting them one by one.

What do Quick, Standard and Deep mean?

The documentation describes each in a line:

• Quick is a lighter pass. It is the fastest level and the cheapest.
• Standard balances depth, speed and cost. It is the default.
• Deep is the most thorough pass. It takes the longest and costs the most.

The documentation pages on the service and its setup give no review times or prices for the levels, so do not assume figures. Costs are covered on a separate costs page in the docs. What matters is the trade: more depth means more waiting and more spend.

The model itself is not your choice. The docs say Code Review picks the Claude models and the admin settings offer no model choice, so the level is the lever for thoroughness.

Who sets the level?

An owner of the Claude organization, in the admin settings on claude.ai. They choose one default for the organization and can override it for any repository. The documentation's own example is Quick for a routine codebase and Deep for a critical one. A new level applies to reviews that start after the change.

Developers have to ask an owner to change the level. What they can do, if they have write access to the repository, is request a review by commenting @claude review on a pull request. Those reviews are billed to the organization.

What does reviewing a whole GitHub organization involve?

Before, owners added repositories one at a time. Now they can set the "review runs" option on the organization's row in the repository table. That covers every repository the Claude GitHub App can access, including ones created later. (The GitHub App is the add-on that gives Claude access to your repositories.)

Anthropic attaches one warning and three conditions:

• The warning: this can raise spend significantly.
• The GitHub account connected to Claude must be an owner of that GitHub organization.
• The organization must be on github.com. GitHub Enterprise Server instances and personal GitHub accounts are not eligible.
• A monthly spend limit must be set, either for your Claude organization or for Code Review.

Applying it also changes every repository in that organization to the option you select, including repositories you had set individually. Repositories you had turned off on their own rows stay off. The organization row has no review level of its own, so levels are still set per repository or through the organization default.

Separately, each repository chooses when reviews run: once when a pull request is opened, after every push, or only on request. A repository you add starts at "after every push", which runs the most reviews. Combine Deep with "after every push" and the bill climbs quickly.

What does this mean for a team in practice?

The change turns review from a single setting into a budget decision. A few practical ways to use it:

• Match depth to risk. A marketing site can sit on Quick. Payments, sign-in and anything that handles personal data are candidates for Deep. It is the same logic you would use with human reviewers: more attention where mistakes are expensive.
• Set the spend limit before widening the net. For whole-organization coverage a monthly limit is required anyway, so pick the number deliberately.
• Use "on request" for busy repositories. Repositories with many small changes can run reviews only when someone comments @claude review, or once per pull request instead of on every push.
• Do not treat a clean review as sign-off. Anthropic says an empty result does not mean the code is error-free. Keep tests and a human check for anything important.
• Give the reviewer your rules. The docs say you can steer what gets flagged with REVIEW.md and CLAUDE.md files in the repository. The review reads REVIEW.md from the base or default branch, never from the change being reviewed, so a pull request cannot rewrite its own reviewer's instructions.

If you are a founder or manager rather than an engineer, the question to put to your tech lead is simple: "Which of our repositories are on which level, and who decided?" Unless an owner has changed it, the answer is Standard.

Some organizations cannot use the service at all. It is not available with Zero Data Retention or the HIPAA configuration, and not yet with customer-managed encryption keys.

How does Atlas handle code review?

Atlas is an AI engineering team built on Claude Code. It reviews on its own terms. Every build is reviewed as it finishes and comes back releasable, or with fix tasks filed to the engineer who built it. Before a production release, everything going out is reviewed together, with security and performance included when switched on. A change touching sign-in, payments or stored secrets gets a security look at once. Atlas does not describe a Quick, Standard or Deep setting. You can read more on the Atlas home page.

Conclusion

Claude's Code Review now has a depth setting and an organization-wide switch. Both give owners more control, and both make cost a choice rather than a fixed fact. Decide which code deserves Deep, set a spend limit before covering everything, and keep people and tests as the final check.