remote-control: 403 token expiry kills all active sessions instead of refreshing #53563

Description

claude remote-control fatally crashes and kills all active sessions when an OAuth token expires or rotates server-side, instead of refreshing the token and reconnecting gracefully.

When the token becomes stale, the process receives:

Error: Poll: Access denied (403): Account is no longer a member of the
organization associated with this token. Check your organization permissions.

This immediately kills every connected session (observed 12 sessions dying in under 1 second), the process exits, and when restarted (e.g. via launchd KeepAlive), it registers a new environment ID — orphaning all previous sessions. They appear as "inactive" in the Claude app and must be manually reopened.

Observed crash patterns

From ~/Library/Logs/claude-remote-control/daemon.log, the same fatal pattern occurs across multiple error types:

Total: 58 session failures across the log lifetime, in bursts that kill all sessions simultaneously.

Contrast with Desktop app behavior

The Claude Desktop app handles similar auth errors gracefully:

[sessions-bridge] Poll error, backing off: Poll: Failed with status 529:
Authentication service is temporarily unavailable. Retry the request.
[sessions-bridge] Backing off for 1000ms

The Desktop app backs off, retries, and reconnects without losing sessions. The remote-control CLI does not — it treats the same class of transient auth errors as fatal.

Impact

For users running remote-control as an always-on daemon (the intended use case), this means:

• All active work sessions are killed without warning, multiple times per week
• Sessions are orphaned (new environment ID on restart)
• No notification that sessions died — user discovers hours later
• Particularly disruptive for long-running sessions (dispatchers, monitoring)

Steps to reproduce

1. Run claude remote-control --name "Test" --spawn same-dir as a persistent daemon (e.g. via launchd with KeepAlive)
2. Create several sessions through the Claude app
3. Wait for an OAuth token rotation/expiry (seems to happen every few days, sometimes multiple times per day)
4. Observe all sessions die simultaneously with the 403 error

Expected behavior

• remote-control should refresh the OAuth token on 403/401/529 errors (like the Desktop app does)
• Transient auth errors should trigger exponential backoff + retry, not process exit
• If the process does restart, it should attempt to reconnect to existing sessions rather than creating a new environment ID
• At minimum: a 403 "organization" error from a stale token should not be treated as a permanent permission error

Environment

• Claude Code: 2.1.100
• macOS: 26.5 (Darwin 25.5.0 arm64)
• Node: homebrew
• Running via launchd LaunchAgent with KeepAlive: true, ThrottleInterval: 10

Additional error context

The error log also shows repeated Error: Remote Control is not yet enabled for your account. during rapid restart cycles — likely the same stale-token issue manifesting differently during the crash loop before a fresh token is obtained.