Claude Code · September 2026

“Claude Code might not be available in your country”

What the message means, where the check actually happens, the fixes that work, in order, and what no fix will do.

What the message means.

The line shows up in the terminal on first run, under a connection failure: Unable to connect to Anthropic services, then the reason — Failed to connect to api.anthropic.com: ECONNREFUSED, or a timeout — then a note that Claude Code might not be available in your country, pointing at Anthropic’s supported countries. During setup Claude Code probes api.anthropic.com and platform.claude.com before it shows the sign-in step, gives each probe ten seconds, and exits if either fails. The country note is appended to that failure. It is a hint, not a verdict.

That matters because the same message appears for reasons that have nothing to do with geography: a firewall, a corporate proxy, a TLS-inspecting gateway, Docker Desktop intercepting outbound traffic. The GitHub issue most people find was filed from a supported country with a refused connection. The real region signal looks different: an HTTP 403 whose body is an “App unavailable in region” page, or the install script failing with syntax error near unexpected token '<' because it downloaded that page instead of a script. On the account side, claude.com says it directly: Claude is only available in certain regions right now.

The policy behind it, from Anthropic’s support pages: paid plans are only available to users physically located in a supported location, an account needs a phone number from a supported location, and the same list governs the API. Claude Code needs a paid plan or API access, so it inherits both rules.

The fixes, in order.

  1. 01Check the list, and the exceptions

    Read the supported countries page rather than assuming. It is long, and it has partial entries — Ukraine is listed with occupied regions excluded. If your country is on it, the message is almost certainly a network problem; keep going. If it is not, skip to what not to expect.

  2. 02Prove it is the network, not the region

    From the same shell, ask the two hosts Claude Code probes. A refused connection or a timeout is local — a firewall, a proxy, a VPN, a container runtime. A 403 with an HTML body is the region check. If the request works in a browser but not in the terminal, something between the shell and the internet is filtering it.

    curl -sI https://api.anthropic.com curl -sI https://platform.claude.com

  3. 03Give it the proxy

    Corporate networks usually need HTTPS_PROXY set before claude starts; when a probe went through a proxy, Claude Code names the variable in the error. TLS-inspecting proxies also need their root certificate trusted, through the OS store or NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS. SOCKS proxies are not supported. The hosts to allowlist are api.anthropic.com, platform.claude.com, claude.ai, claude.com, and downloads.claude.ai; the full table is in the network configuration docs.

    export HTTPS_PROXY=http://proxy.example.com:8080 export NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS=/path/to/corp-ca.pem claude

  4. 04Match the network to where you are

    A company VPN that exits in another country shows Anthropic that country, not yours. If you are in a supported location and the VPN’s egress is not, disconnect it or split-tunnel Anthropic’s hosts so traffic leaves from where you are. Check the account too: it needs a phone number from a supported location, and /status inside Claude Code shows which login is active.

  5. 05Run through a cloud region you are allowed to use

    Claude Code can send model traffic to Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Foundry instead of to Anthropic directly. Authentication and model requests then go to your provider rather than to api.anthropic.com or claude.ai, and no browser login is needed. It is billed by the provider, needs Claude models enabled in a region that serves them, and is governed by the provider’s terms and Anthropic’s usage policies. Run claude and choose “3rd-party platform” for the Bedrock or Vertex AI wizard, or set the variables yourself: Bedrock, Vertex AI, Foundry.

    # Amazon Bedrock export CLAUDE_CODE_USE_BEDROCK=1 export AWS_REGION=us-east-1 # Google Cloud (Vertex AI) export CLAUDE_CODE_USE_VERTEX=1 export CLOUD_ML_REGION=global export ANTHROPIC_VERTEX_PROJECT_ID=your-project # Microsoft Foundry export CLAUDE_CODE_USE_FOUNDRY=1 export ANTHROPIC_FOUNDRY_RESOURCE=your-resource

What not to expect.

Reinstalling does not change the answer, and neither does the npm package instead of the native installer: the check is on the network path, not the binary. A consumer VPN pointed at a supported country is not a fix we will describe — the plans are for people physically located in supported places, and appearing elsewhere puts the account at odds with those terms. Support is for people in a supported country who are still blocked, not a route to an exception. And the free plan does not include Claude Code, so a free account gets no further.

If the host is somewhere supported.

There is one honest arrangement the message does not cover. Claude Code runs on a machine, and the machine can be somewhere else: a build box at the office, a cloud VM in a region you are entitled to use, signed in with the account entitled to it. Reaching that host from wherever you are is a solved problem: spawnd puts one daemon on it, which dials out — no open ports, no VPN needed — and any browser becomes the console, end-to-end encrypted between your browser and the daemon. Claude Code authenticates on the host, as always; spawnd holds no provider credentials. It changes which machine does the work and how you reach it, not who is entitled to the account. The shape of it is at /claude-code-remote.

Start

Reach the host that can run it.

$curl -fsSL https://spawnd.dev/install.sh | sh
Sign up free
Install the daemon

Questions

Is Claude Code available in my country?
If your country is on Anthropic’s supported-countries list, yes, with a paid plan or API access. The list covers claude.ai and the API together; Claude Code needs one of those, so it follows the same list.
Why do I see this in a supported country?
Because the note is appended to any failed connectivity probe. A firewall, a corporate proxy, TLS inspection, or a VPN exiting elsewhere produces the same message. Test api.anthropic.com with curl from the same shell and set HTTPS_PROXY if your network needs it.
Does a VPN fix it?
A work VPN that exits in your real country can, by making the network match where you are. Using a VPN to appear in a country you are not in is against the plans’ physical-location terms, and we do not recommend it. Bedrock, Vertex AI, and Foundry are the legitimate way to run Claude Code through a cloud region you are allowed to use.