Why didn’t the Claude Agent reply?

An agent that stays quiet nearly always has a reason it can tell you. Open the agent’s Activity tab and turn on Show skipped messages — each skipped message says why. The common causes, in the order to check them:

Check these

1. Pro is active. The Claude Agent is a Pro feature. When a trial or subscription ends, the Agents page shows a locked preview and agents stop answering.
2. The model passed its test. On Brain & budget, Test connection must pass with “tool use works”. A model outside Anthropic cannot go live without it, and an expired or changed key fails here too.
3. How freely it acts. In Observe the agent only writes drafts to the Inbox; in Copilot every reply waits for your approval. Look in the Inbox under Waiting for your approval.
4. Business hours. With business hours on and Outside hours set to stay silent, the agent does not answer at night or on closed days.
5. Budget. At the daily or monthly limit the agent hands chats to a person, pauses itself, or switches to the fallback model — whichever you chose. The monthly cap for all agents is a hard stop. Each chat also has a daily turn limit (40 by default).
6. Paused. The agent itself, or Pause all agents at the top of the Agents page.
7. A person took over. When someone types in a chat, the agent steps aside for that chat (about two hours) — hand it back from the Inbox.
8. The customer opted out with an opt-out word such as “stop”, or the message was in a group and nobody mentioned or replied to the agent.
9. The number is offline. The app must be running and the number connected. For answers around the clock, run SocialMate as a headless server with auto-reconnect.

Step-by-step guide

The go-live checklist covers each of these settings, and Inbox, hand-offs and take-over explains how to give a chat back. Still stuck? Contact support.

Still stuck — open a ticket · Back to all articles