Anthropic's May 6 update to Claude Desktop (version 1.6259.1) quietly locked down its Gateway feature, killing the community workaround that let users route non-Claude models through third-party providers like OpenRouter. The update adds a model ID whitelist to the Gateway's model discovery endpoint, only allowing IDs starting with claude or anthropic.
Users quickly hit the wall: an Ollama user reported that the Gateway returned 39 models, but Claude Desktop showed zero available after filtering. Manually setting a non-Anthropic model in inferenceModels throws an error: "configured model is not an Anthropic model. Gateway deployments require an Anthropic model from the provider catalog." One clever user set up a local proxy to map Kimi K2.6's ID to claude-sonnet-4-6 and got it working again, confirming the restriction is purely on model ID filtering — not protocol or capability checks.
The same day, Anthropic also tightened Claude Code CLI 2.1.129's Gateway integration. Model discovery, which was on by default in version 2.1.126, now requires manually setting the environment variable CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_GATEWAY_MODEL_DISCOVERY=1 to query the gateway's model list.