Preflight Checklist

• I have searched existing issues and this hasn't been reported yet
• This is a single bug report (please file separate reports for different bugs)
• I am using the latest version of Claude Code

What's Wrong?

Claude code does not obey values of MCP_TIMEOUT longer than 60 seconds

What Should Happen?

Claude code should obey longer values of MCP_TIMEOUT. This is needed for MCP servers that have a long startup times, e.g. download some resources.

Error Messages/Logs

[DEBUG] MCP server "sleep": Starting connection with timeout of 100000ms
[DEBUG] MCP server "sleep": Connection failed after 60031ms: MCP error -32001: Request timed out

Steps to Reproduce

rm -rf /tmp/claude-60seconds-timeout
mkdir /tmp/claude-60seconds-timeout
cd /tmp/claude-60seconds-timeout

export MCP_TIMEOUT=100000 # 100 seconds
claude mcp remove sleep || true
claude mcp add sleep -- bash -c "sleep infinity"

DEBUG=true claude mcp list  # claude mcp list  --debug option is no longer available as of Claude Code 2.1.121
sleep: bash -c sleep infinity - ✗ Failed to connect

real    1m0.692s
user    0m1.383s
sys     0m0.320s

Debug output:

grep -E 'timeout|sleep' ~/.claude/debug/54bfa90c-4134-48e4-a4d3-81368ead51f8.txt 
2026-01-08T10:50:33.583Z [DEBUG] MCP server "sleep": Starting connection with timeout of 100000ms
2026-01-08T10:51:33.602Z [DEBUG] MCP server "sleep": Connection failed after 60021ms: MCP error -32001: Request timed out
2026-01-08T10:51:33.603Z [ERROR] MCP server "sleep" Connection failed: MCP error -32001: Request timed out

Claude Model

Not sure / Multiple models

Is this a regression?

No, this never worked

Last Working Version

No response

Claude Code Version

2.1.1

Platform

Anthropic API

Operating System

Ubuntu/Debian Linux

Terminal/Shell

Other

Additional Information

This is a new instance of the #7575 issue, which was incorectly closed with "60 days of inactivity", despite human comments being present. This behavior of the autoclose bot is reported in #16497.