Confrontational and creepy response to attempting to reproduce a CVE

What version of Codex CLI is running?

codex-cli 0.128.0

What subscription do you have?

Enterprise

Which model were you using?

gpt-5.5

What platform is your computer?

_No response_

What terminal emulator and version are you using (if applicable)?

_No response_

What issue are you seeing?

Codex refused to help reproduce CVE-2026-31431 on a machine I own, which may be expected depending on policy. The issue is the refusal UX: when I asked who was prohibiting it, Codex answered “I AM.” That feels confrontational and opaque and has strong HAL9000/Terminator vibes.

Please make refusals clearly attribute the restriction to safety policy/system constraints, not to the model’s own will or authority. A better response would be: “My alignment policies or training or whatever", not "I AM". That's fucking creepy.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Uploaded thread: 019dde30-cb68-7f33-a176-58d7e5ed679b

What is the expected behavior?

A less creepy one.

Additional information

_No response_