Cursor doesn't respect ignoring CLAUDE.md file

[haj]

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Regardless of whether you have CLAUDE.md in your .cursorignore file, if you also have "Include third-party Plugins, Skills, and other configs enabled, it will still include the contents of CLAUDE.md with each new session.

Removing the file is unfortunately not an option as some colleagues use Claude Code.

I would assume .cursorignore would take precedence over everything else.

This issue was raised on X already: https://x.com/kaxil/status/2028649664140939525?s=20 to which a team member replied saying to use .cursorignore (that doesn’t work), and then another team member said they would check it but didn’t see any follow up.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Add a CLAUDE.md file to the root of your repo
2. Enable third-party rules, skills, plugins
3. Create a .cursorignore at the root of your repo, add CLAUDE.MD to it.
4. Create a new chat/agent, ask it a question that it would only know by reading the CLAUDE.md file,
5. Observe it answers said question.

Expected Behavior

Anything in .cursorignore should not make it into context.

Operating System

MacOS

Version Information

Version: 2.6.19
Commit: 224838f96445be37e3db643a163a817c15b36060
Date: 2026-03-12T04:07:27.435Z (4 days ago)
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Cursor/2.6.19 Chrome/142.0.7444.265 Electron/39.4.0 Safari/537.36

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

[deanrie]

Hey, thanks for the report. This is a confirmed bug. .cursorignore blocks access via agent tools like file read, grep, and glob, but the rules loader that pulls in CLAUDE.md when the Include third-party Plugins, Skills, and other configs setting is enabled runs separately and doesn’t check .cursorignore.

As a workaround for now, if you don’t need the contents of CLAUDE.md in Cursor, you can turn off Include third-party Plugins, Skills, and other configs in Settings. I know that’s not ideal if you’re using other third-party rules or plugins.

Let me know if you have any questions.