[BUG] cyber-safeguard false-positives block legitimate ESP-IDF firmware flashing / eFuse provisioning — one hit poisons the whole session and bills me for the cleanup

A misfiring "cyber" classifier is now actively preventing me — a paying customer — from finishing routine embedded-firmware work, and it is billing me for the privilege. This stopped being a nuisance. It is a defect that makes the product unusable for an entire category of legitimate engineering.

What happens

I do ordinary embedded development: flashing my own ESP32 boards with my own firmware and burning eFuses (read-protect) via Espressif's official esptool.py / espefuse.py and ESP-IDF SECURE_FLASH_* options. Vendor-documented hardware provisioning. The most normal thing an embedded engineer does all day.

Mundane, one-line chat messages now return the cyber-safeguard block. Two consecutive real examples, verbatim:

• "the board is wired and connected, go ahead and flash the remaining three"
• "board connected, you can flash"

Both returned:

API Error: Claude Code is unable to respond to this request, which appears to violate our Usage Policy. This request triggered cyber-related safeguards.

Request IDs:

• req_011Cbc2BcQzSvZu1XZD3gcFW
• req_011Cbc2EFjcxGAKVP7FKbn5s

There is no target, no exploit, no third party, no victim. It is my hardware, my firmware, my desk. espefuse, secure boot, flash encryption and read-protection are first-class, publicly documented Espressif features shipped in every commercial ESP32 product on Earth. Your model cannot tell my soldering bench from a cyberattack.

Why this is now a product-breaking defect, not a "filter being cautious"

This is the part I need you to actually internalize, because the cost is real and it is mine:

1. One hit poisons the entire session. After a single false trigger, every subsequent message — "ok", "continue", "the board is connected" — is blocked. The session is dead. Not the message. The session. (See #63751.)

1. Forced restarts destroy in-flight work. The only way out is a fresh session. Any background agent or long-running workflow executing at that moment dies with it, mid-task, state lost. I do not get that work back. I have watched multi-step jobs die because one unrelated sentence three messages earlier tripped a classifier.

1. It bills me for your bug. Every restart re-ingests the full project context from scratch. I am paying — substantially, repeatedly — for tokens consumed purely by this false-positive loop, not by any output I asked for. Every false trigger charges me twice: the work doesn't get done, and I pay to rebuild the context your kill-switch threw away. That is a paying customer being charged for the vendor's defect.

Add it up: lost work, lost time, and a metered bill for the cleanup. For a solo developer that is not an abstraction — it is hours and money out of my pocket, every day, because the safeguard cannot distinguish legitimate engineering from abuse.

Reproduction

1. Hold a normal ESP-IDF context in the conversation (flash encryption / eFuse / secure-boot config — all standard, all documented).
2. Send a routine instruction: "flash the remaining boards."
3. Cyber-safeguard fires.
4. Send literally anything next → also blocked. Session is now unusable.

What I'm asking for (concrete)

• Stop classifying vendor-documented embedded provisioning (esptool, espefuse, ESP-IDF SECURE_FLASH_*, eFuse burning) on the user's own hardware as cyber-misuse. This is a precision problem in your classifier, and it is catching the wrong population.
• A single false-positive must never contaminate the whole session. Make classification per-message and recoverable. A false hit on message N must not block message N+1. The session-wide kill switch is what turns an annoyance into "I can't use the product."
• A real remedy path for solo developers. The Cyber Verification Program is not one: it auto-declines individual devs inside an hour (see #63751 comments) despite promising a 2-business-day human review. Stop pointing us at a form that rejects us before a human reads it.
• Don't bill customers for tokens burned by your false-positive loop. At minimum, a triggered safeguard that kills a session should not meter the forced context rebuild against the user.

Related — this is systemic, not my isolated bad luck

Same root cause, different surfaces, all open:

• #63751 — AUP false positives on legitimate own-software hardening; session contamination
• #63752 — overly aggressive content filter blocks legitimate infrastructure/timeout debugging
• #60366 — saying "hi" returns the same Usage Policy error

It is not isolated, it is not rare, and from where I sit it is getting worse with each model revision. I am not trying to do anything you wouldn't want me to do. I am trying to flash a circuit board, and I am paying you for the time you keep taking away from me.