[BUG]: GPT-5.3 Codex use web search many times without reason

Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened May 15, 2026 by Dovlan1990 Closed May 16, 2026

💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What version of Codex CLI is running?

0.130.0

What subscription do you have?

pro

Which model were you using?

gpt-5.3-codex

What platform is your computer?

ubuntu Linux 6.17.0-23-generic x86_64 x86_64

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

_No response_

Codex doctor report

019e2dfe-dc79-7a82-8ae9-733ef031633e

What issue are you seeing?

The model uses many web search calls for no reason with empty query.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

just use gpt-5.3-codex

What is the expected behavior?

_No response_

Additional information

_No response_

View original on GitHub ↗

3 Comments

github-actions[bot] contributor · 3 months ago

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

#21836

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etraut-openai contributor · 3 months ago

Thanks for the bug report. This appears to be model behavior, not a Codex harness issue. We'll share the feedback with the team responsible for training our codex models. We're tracking this feedback and similar reports so we can improve future models. And thanks for using the /feedback command. That additional information is useful.

mekineer-com · 3 months ago

Adding forensic evidence from local Codex session logs (same behavior, recent dates).

Observed pattern in saved session JSONL records:

event_msg.payload.type = "web_search_end"
query = "" (empty string)
action = {"type":"other"}
also saw one action = {"type":"open_page"} with no url

Counts from 3 separate sessions:

019cc298-...-58fdd8969d48 (2026-05-20 UTC window):
web_search_end: 48
empty-query web_search_end: 11
action.type="other": 10
open_page without URL: 1
019d0dfa-...-b102fb4aaad7 (2026-05-18 UTC):
web_search_end: 7
empty-query: 2
action.type="other": 2
019e0f9a-...-e8f8c2384c8b (2026-05-10 UTC):
web_search_end: 2
empty-query: 2
action.type="other": 2

Concrete rows from the first session:

line 27571: {"type":"event_msg","payload":{"type":"web_search_end","query":"","action":{"type":"other"}}}
line 27574: same shape
line 27972: {"type":"event_msg","payload":{"type":"web_search_end","query":"","action":{"type":"open_page"}}} (no URL)

This looks like malformed/degenerate web-search tool events in addition to “over-eager searching” behavior.