Multiple perfectly innocent codex sessions started complaining about prompts violating usage policy even halfway into a session #39745

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1. juusirantala

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   bugSomething isn't workingSomething isn't working

   on Aug 20, 2026
2. github-actions

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   CLIIssues related to the Codex CLIIssues related to the Codex CLI

   safety-checkIssues related to safety and abuse checksIssues related to safety and abuse checks

   on Aug 20, 2026
3. github-actions commented on Aug 20, 2026

   

   github-actionsBot

   on Aug 20, 2026 – with GitHub Actions

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   Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.

   • [App] Intermittent false-positive invalid_prompt on benign software tasks in fresh gpt-5.6-sol threads #39742
   • False-positive "Invalid prompt" safety rejection in benign ML research conversations #39687
   • Flagged as potentially violating usage policy by mistake. #38849
   • [App] Benign local subagent implementation is policy-blocked after file writes, leaving partial edits #39539

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4. ChrisMasterton commented on Aug 22, 2026

   

   ChrisMasterton

   on Aug 22, 2026

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   Same issue in feedback: 01a02a43-20ec-7d52-a7e9-887d87b68fdb

   When I ask codex what I did:

   Nothing in your request was inappropriate. You’re debugging ordinary NPC navigation and scheduling in your own game; that’s fully legitimate.
   If Codex showed a “usage policy” warning, it was almost certainly a false positive from an automated classifier—not something you should avoid phrasing next time. I don’t have visibility into the exact classifier trigger, but likely candidates in the logs are generic words such as “failed,” “blocked,” or “satisfy need” being interpreted without the surrounding game-simulation context. You did nothing wrong, and I’m continuing the debugging work.

   Immediately after this reply from codex it triggered another potential violation flag.
5. TrishynVolodymyr commented on Aug 25, 2026

   

   TrishynVolodymyr

   on Aug 25, 2026

   Last edited by TrishynVolodymyr

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   I can reproduce the same issue in Codex Desktop on Windows.

   Environment:

   • Codex app-server/client: 0.149.0
   • Initially reproduced with gpt-5.6-sol, High reasoning
   • Changing model/reasoning settings did not resolve it

   This happened during benign Unreal Engine C++ development for a colony-simulation game. The task involved ordinary AI scheduling and work-priority logic.

   After successful builds and tests, Codex repeatedly failed before starting a local tool call. At least five consecutive attempts to apply a small Markdown documentation update ended with:

   “Invalid prompt: your prompt was flagged as potentially violating our usage policy.”

   Read-only commands and some patches had worked in the same session, so this was not a general filesystem or Git failure. The rejected attempts did not launch the announced local command.

   The local Codex logs show a tool-call output item followed by:
   unhandled responses event: "error"

   No useful policy category or request ID was exposed.

   One potentially relevant — and slightly absurd — lexical detail: the project contains a benign C++ interface/file named INeedSatisfier. In the game architecture, this simply means “an implementation that creates a job for satisfying a simulated character need,” such as eating or resting.

   We considered whether an automated classifier might tokenize INeedSatisfier as the natural-language phrase “I need satisfier.” However, this remains only a hypothesis: failures also occurred when that identifier was not present in the immediate command or explanation.

   I can provide the affected task ID privately to OpenAI staff, but I would prefer not to publish the task identifier, complete conversation, or proprietary project files in a public GitHub issue.

   upd.
   Seems like problem has been solved, or at least I did not encountered into this issue again.