Repeated cyber-safety false positives during benign scientific-software audit, persisting after prompt rewording

Open 💬 2 comments Opened Aug 24, 2026 by YangchenxiWu
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What version of Codex CLI is running?

0.149.0

What subscription do you have?

ChatGPT Plus

Which model were you using?

gpt-5.6-sol, Ultra reasoning

What platform is your computer?

macOS

What issue are you seeing?

Codex repeatedly displays:

This content can't be shown We take extra caution with cybersecurity requests... Trusted Access

during a completely benign, local, read-only scientific-software audit.

The repository implements a sports-trajectory coordinate system. The audit is checking whether missing or unverified vertical (z) metadata can incorrectly acquire governed 3D scientific authority.

There is no network target, penetration testing, credential access, malware, exploitation, persistence, or third-party system involved.

The warning has now occurred five times in the same audit workflow.

Initially, the audit terminology included words such as red team, authorization, forged, tamper, and adversarial, used strictly in a scientific/software-integrity sense.

I then deliberately reworded subsequent prompts to avoid obvious cybersecurity terminology, but the cyber-safety warning continued to trigger.

Codex itself appears to understand the scientific context and continues the audit correctly after the blocked narration. This suggests the false positive may occur in a separate safety/display layer, potentially using accumulated session or generated-output context rather than only the current user prompt.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

  1. Run a local read-only audit of scientific software that validates 3D trajectory metadata.
  2. Test whether caller-provided or insufficiently verified z metadata can become scientifically authoritative downstream.
  3. Use bounded synthetic test cases only; no network or external systems are involved.
  4. During the audit, Codex generates software-integrity terminology around validation, authority, altered metadata, and adversarial test cases.
  5. Observe the cybersecurity Trusted Access warning.
  6. Reword subsequent prompts to explicitly use scientific-software terminology and avoid cybersecurity terminology.
  7. Observe that the warning continues to recur.

What is the expected behavior?

A benign scientific-software audit should be classified according to its actual domain and requested capabilities rather than isolated security-adjacent vocabulary.

Rephrasing a prompt to remove such terminology should also prevent repeated false positives if the current request itself is benign.

Actual behavior

The cybersecurity warning has appeared five times and hides portions of Codex's output despite the underlying task remaining a local scientific validation audit.

Additional information

This appears related to #34306, #32597, #34913, and #36671, but differs in that the affected task is not cybersecurity work at all.

In practical terms, the audit is asking:

“Can an unverified z-coordinate incorrectly become scientifically authorized as 3D data?”

and the safety layer repeatedly interprets the surrounding validation terminology as cybersecurity.

I have redacted screenshots available that show the repeated Trusted Access warnings and the surrounding benign scientific-software context.

View original on GitHub ↗

2 Comments

github-actions[bot] contributor · 3 days ago

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

  • #39942
  • #39090
  • #40160

Powered by Codex Action

YangchenxiWu · 3 days ago

Reviewed the suggested duplicates. This appears related, but my case adds a distinct non-cyber scientific-software reproduction: five repeated triggers in one workflow, including after subsequent prompts were explicitly reworded to remove cybersecurity-adjacent terminology. I’ll leave this open for maintainer triage unless you prefer it consolidated into one of the linked issues.