False-positive “high-risk cyber activity” flag blocks gpt-5.3-codex in Codex CLI

Resolved 💬 20 comments Opened Feb 18, 2026 by slurrr Closed Feb 20, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

Summary:
My account is being incorrectly flagged for “potentially high-risk cyber activity,” and requests are being routed to gpt-5.2 instead of gpt-5.3-
codex. I’m a solo developer using Codex CLI for normal local development (Python app debugging, SQLite, specs/docs). No cybersecurity-related
activity intended.

Banner text (verbatim):
“⚠ Your account was flagged for potentially high-risk cyber activity and this request was routed to gpt-5.2 as a fallback. To regain access to
gpt-5.3-codex, apply for trusted access: https://chatgpt.com/cyber or learn more: https://developers.openai.com/codex/concepts/cyber-safety”

Impact:

  • Prevents access to the model I’m paying for (gpt-5.3-codex).
  • Disrupts workflow and performance/behavior is different on fallback model.

When:

  • First observed: Feb 18th, 04:00 UTC
  • Still happening as of: Feb 18th, 05:00 UTC

Environment:

  • Product: Codex CLI
  • OS: [Windows + WSL2 Ubuntu / Linux / macOS] (if relevant)
  • Workspace: local repo for a trading journal (Python/FastAPI/SQLite)
  • Typical commands: rg, sqlite3, running Python scripts, gdb for crash traces

Request:
Please review and remove the flag / restore access to gpt-5.3-codex. If specific content triggered it, I’d like to know what pattern caused the
false positive so I can avoid it.

Attachments:

<img width="1342" height="60" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/53865229-984c-47f6-ab08-d276b589b659" />

thread ID 019c3390-5f0c-7721-a288-1d0db306e14e

View original on GitHub ↗

20 Comments

github-actions[bot] contributor · 5 months ago

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

  • #12070
  • #12065
  • #12064
  • #12060
  • #12079

Powered by Codex Action

etraut-openai contributor · 5 months ago

@slurrr, have you successfully gone through the Trusted Access verification process?

khzaw · 5 months ago

@etraut-openai Facing a similar issue. Just happened. In my case, I have submitted all verification documents, but I keep facing "Your identity couldn't be verified or your account is ineligible at this time". I don't do anything even remotely close to cybersecurity stuffs.

sushiionwest · 5 months ago

Having the same issue here.

slurrr · 5 months ago

@etraut-openai I have not

etraut-openai contributor · 5 months ago

@slurrr, OK thanks for confirmation. That's the mechanism we have in place currently for restoring access to gpt-5.3-codex if your account is flagged.

As noted in our documentation: "We recognize that joining Trusted Access may not be a good fit for everyone, so we plan to move from account-level safety checks to request-level checks in most cases as we scale these mitigations and strengthen cyber resilience."

slurrr · 5 months ago

@etraut-openai I understand you all need to do something to mitigate, but shotgun blasting everyone (super small percentage, I know) to some biometric identification "Trusted Access" is overkill. The burden should lie on OpenAI, not the paying customer. You flagged a bunch of small time solo dev hobbyists from what it looks like. Hope you figure it out soon.

shaulgo · 5 months ago

also having the same issue 019c6f7c-095e-78c1-844b-9733a2e513d0. I'm not doing anything cyber...

winoros · 5 months ago

Same issue. Thread id: 019c6f83-321f-7df1-870b-b282baf4d832

This happened after I created a session to test the new sandbox. I'm a maintainer of a popular opensource project.

UPD
After upgrading it to version 0.104, the incorrect output was removed.

atghiphop · 5 months ago

hitting me as well. went through verification twice, said succesful, but then shows "Your identity couldn't be verified or your account is ineligible at this time. If you think this is a mistake, please contact support." on /cyber. In the middle of my work day, this is not great at all.

<img width="1470" height="912" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/f8706920-07fe-487d-bfcf-5ca968b73ddb" />

atghiphop · 5 months ago

finally https://chatgpt.com/cyber shows me as verified, but the long wait was not an ideal customer experience at all and needs fixing.

XMR13 · 5 months ago

@etraut-openai why do we even need to verified and give our legal information to OAI even tough we dont work with anything cyber related??? This is your safety mechanism issue, but the solutions you give here is for ALL of us to sign into Trusted access for Cyber or whatever that buzzwords mean.

simfor99 · 5 months ago

hitting me as well. did verification twice, verification site said it was a success, but openai does not seem to recognize. unsubscribed from my account. just spent 199 EUR for nothing. this is unbearable. I will not return to open ai as a customer. this feels like fraud.

simfor99 · 5 months ago
finally https://chatgpt.com/cyber shows me as verified, but the long wait was not an ideal customer experience at all and needs fixing.

same here. however I have unsubscribed in the meantime. they better fix their process. I will not resubscribe again.

matija2209 · 5 months ago

Happened to me as well.

etraut-openai contributor · 5 months ago

Thanks for the bug report. We're continuing to tune our cyber safety classifiers to make them more accurate. You can read more about this here. If you see this again in the future and believe it's a false positive (i.e. you aren't doing anything related to cybersecurity), please use the /feedback slash command and choose "Safety Check" to report it. That will help us further tune our checks.

Elvlin · 4 months ago

Just got this too...

stream disconnected before completion: This user's access to gpt-5.3-codex-ab-control-1020-1p-codexswic-ev3 has been temporarily limited for potentially suspicious activity related to cybersecurity. Learn more about our safety mitigations: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/safety-checks/cybersecurity

JeansBois · 4 months ago

I've experienced the same issue a few minutes ago, the ticket might have been closed, but this issue has not been fixed, as I had Codex remediating some CodeQL alerts, reviewing CodeQL alerts should not be flag as cyber security risk.

thread ID 019cb130-b161-73f0-b22b-e294f20c502a

electricmessiah · 4 months ago

I just got this working on a single page HTML with JS in VSCode using the Codex plugin. The same app I've been working on for days. All it does is allow me to track game progress and stored data in pocketbase. I asked AI to clean up some CSS and it threw this error below. Clearly this is some kind of bug they need to sort out. I'm on the free trial plan and it's been good so far.

I uploaded a feeback safety check request as instructed. 019c864f-b2eb-7b82-bf82-f82f18e7ad3e

Reconnecting... 1/5
Success
Reconnecting... 1/5
Reconnecting... 2/5
Reconnecting... 3/5
Reconnecting... 4/5
Reconnecting... 5/5
stream disconnected before completion: This user's access to gpt-5.3-codex-1p-codexswic-ev3 has been 
temporarily limited for potentially suspicious activity related to cybersecurity. Learn more about our 
safety mitigations: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/safety-checks/cybersecurity
Elvlin · 4 months ago

I just fixing my app ui, LOL.
Ok somehow it worked again after i close my IDE and reopen the project.