Privacy

Routing starts off in every session. Routing and cost estimate requests stay off until routing is on. The meter, cache clock and plan pace use the usage information Claude Code already reports.

With a usable IQ key, IQ Code reads your dashboard's session defaults from IQ at startup and at most once every ten minutes, even with routing off. The request is a GET with no body, and it sends no prompt content. Without a usable IQ key, it sends nothing to IQ.

When you try to turn routing on, IQ Code first checks your plan with a usage-only request. That request contains no prompt or task brief. If the response identifies your key as Free, routing stays off for the session and no prompt or task brief is sent for routing. If the check fails or is unavailable, routing can turn on, and a plan-required response to a routing request then pauses it.

Use /iq-route off to stop routing and cost estimate requests. To stop every IQ request, including the session defaults read, set CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC (any value, even empty or 0), set IQ_ROUTER_DISABLED=1, or create ~/.claude/iq/router/OFF.

Claude Code still connects to Anthropic as usual. Turning IQ routing off does not change Anthropic's own data handling.

With routing on, IQ Code sends your typed prompts and, for each subagent task Claude starts, the subagent brief: the task text Claude wrote for that subagent (secrets scrubbed best-effort, at most 16,000 characters). With routing off, no prompt or task text is sent.

Requests also include filtered recent typed prompts from this session (up to about 8,000 tokens), model, thinking-level and agent-type labels, conversation size and cache timing facts, and plugin version information. Your replies and model tokens still travel directly between Claude Code and Anthropic on your own plan.

Apart from the subagent brief, assistant replies, tool results, file attachments, IDE selections and injected context are not sent. The subagent brief is model-written, so it can quote files or tool output. Text you paste into a typed prompt is part of that prompt, even when it contains code or file contents.

Secret scrubbing runs locally before anything is sent. It is best-effort: recognized secret patterns can be removed, but it cannot catch every secret or sensitive detail. Avoid pasting material you do not want IQ to receive.

Rough session cost estimates can be requested after the first completed main-thread call while routing is on, then at most once per 30 seconds and at least four new calls apart. Estimate requests send usage numbers (conversation and cache-read tokens), model and thinking-level labels, call, helper and compaction counts, spend, active time, lifecycle and usage-status labels, a random session number and a request sequence number to IQ. These requests contain no prompt, answer, file or tool text.

The IQ key is stored on your machine by Claude Code. Set it with /plugin configure iq-code@iq-routing, then run /reload-plugins. Claude Code stores the key in the macOS Keychain, falling back to ~/.claude/.credentials.json if the Keychain rejects the write. Linux and Windows use ~/.claude/.credentials.json (%USERPROFILE%\.claude\.credentials.json on Windows). The key authenticates requests to IQ. Keep it out of project files.

Uninstalling the plugin from its last install scope removes the key Claude Code stores for it, so add the key again after you reinstall. --keep-data keeps the plugin's data folder; it does not keep the key.

IQ Code does not need your Anthropic API key. The IQ key is separate from the credentials Claude Code uses with Anthropic.

IQ Code keeps preferences, session usage readings, routing metadata and diagnostics in ~/.claude/iq/. Typed prompt history is held in memory. IQ Code does not deliberately save prompt text, answers or tool and file contents there.

Diagnostics are scrubbed best-effort and can retain sensitive text that is not recognized. Review local diagnostics before sharing them. The Claude Code uninstall command does not delete ~/.claude/iq/, and the installers keep it unless you use --purge. See uninstall to remove local IQ Code data.

/iq-route off
/iq-route status

You can keep using the local meter and theme after stopping routing. There is no separate subagent switch: with routing on, the subagent brief is sent, and stopping routing stops it.

The Privacy Policy covers IQ's service-side processing and your privacy rights.