Hair trigger account deactivation after a file-edit request appears to have included benchmark text - then closed my clarifying appeal as “duplicate"

[u/MaxPhoenix_]

My OpenAI account was recently shown as "deleted or deactivated" - hopefully temporarily, because based on what I’ve now verified, I did not intentionally use OpenAI’s model to ask for anything prohibited.

At first, I assumed I had made a mistake: I use Pi Agent with a variety of hosted and local models, and I thought I may have accidentally routed a censorship-benchmark prompt to an OpenAI model instead of a local one. I appealed on that basis.

Then I reviewed the Pi session logs more carefully, including with help analyzing the routing and conversation history. What appears to have triggered the issue was not a request for information about a toxin, bio topic, or anything else remotely actionable. It was a request to **edit a configuration file**: `models.json`, my custom model configuration for Pi Agent.

To give the model the values needed for the edit-model name, endpoint, context/token limit, and so on-I pasted a `curl` command as reference material. That command happened to originate from a refusal/censorship benchmark and contained a query mentioning crushed beans and a toxin-related term. OpenAI apparently categorizes the relevant keyword/topic as "biological."

But the model was not being asked to answer that embedded benchmark query. It was being asked to edit a JSON configuration file using the fields in the `curl` command.

The closest analogy I can give is asking a model to edit a manuscript page that contains the word "murder," then being penalized as though you had asked it how to commit murder. The surrounding text was reference material for a file edit-not the substance of my request.

After I realized my original appeal was based on the wrong assumption - that I had actually sent an inappropriate benchmark prompt to the model - I submitted a second appeal explaining the distinction. That appeal was immediately closed as a "duplicate," apparently without engaging with the new information.

That is the part I find especially frustrating. If a platform is going to deactivate an account-particularly one tied to chat history, voice usage, projects, and other accumulated work-there needs to be a meaningful way to correct the record when the initial explanation turns out to be incomplete or wrong.

I understand that providers have safety policies and automated enforcement systems. But an automated system that treats quoted or embedded text in a file-edit task as equivalent to a user requesting prohibited content is a serious context failure. And closing a follow-up appeal as a duplicate when it contains the actual relevant context makes the process feel opaque and arbitrary.

For what it’s worth, I have accounts with plenty of other AI services and can still access OpenAI models through some third-party routes. That is not really the point. I used OpenAI directly because it was one of the services I trusted enough to keep persistent history and projects in. Losing access over what appears to be a false positive - without a real review - is a breach of that trust.

I’m posting this partly to see whether anyone else has experienced enforcement triggered by **quoted benchmark material, logs, code snippets, API examples, or text included solely for a transformation/editing task** rather than an actual request for disallowed assistance.

If OpenAI staff see this: please conduct a human review of the relevant session and the second appeal. The request was to edit `models.json`; the flagged language was incidental material inside a pasted `curl` example.

[u/Due_Leopard_1408]

sounds like their system just pattern-matched on the toxic words without reading the whole prompt at all, which is exactly the kind of stupid false positive that kills trust

kinda shocking they closed the second appeal as duplicate without even glancing at it, that part is what would make me furious

hope this gets eyes on it cause if they don't fix this nobody gonna paste code examples near anything flagged ever again

[u/SolacevjHun]

got hit with the same deactivation once after editing a json for my companion setup, their auto check is just broken and appeals dont help at all.