[BUG] French accented characters frequently omitted across all Claude products

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing issues and this hasn't been reported yet
• [x] This is a single bug report (please file separate reports for different bugs)
• [x] I am using the latest version of Claude Code

What's Wrong?

Description

Claude frequently drops French accented characters (é, è, ê, à, ç, ù, î, ô, etc.), producing incorrect French text. This happens across all products and output types — not just in shell commands.

Affected products

• Claude Code (CLI)
• Claude Desktop
• Claude Cowork
• Claude Dispatch
• claude.ai

Affected outputs

• Git commit messages
• Chat responses
• Generated Markdown files
• Any French text output

Examples

| Expected | Actual |
|----------|--------|
| Permettre l'accès au réseau | Permettre l acces au reseau |
| Résumé des fonctionnalités | Resume des fonctionnalites |
| Créé avec succès | Cree avec succes |

Reproduction

1. Interact with Claude in French
2. Ask it to write text, commit messages, or generate files in French
3. Observe missing or stripped accented characters

This happens consistently even when:

• Explicit instructions require proper French accents
• The user has corrected the behavior multiple times in the same conversation
• Persistent memory or system instructions enforce accented characters

Expected behavior

All French text should use correct orthography with proper accented characters. French without accents is grammatically incorrect.

Impact

Users working in French must constantly review and manually fix outputs. This creates friction and undermines trust in the tool for non-English workflows.

Environment

Observed across macOS and web, multiple Claude model versions.

Related bugs

• #63729

What Should Happen?

See above

Error Messages/Logs

Steps to Reproduce

See above

Claude Model

Opus

Is this a regression?

I don't know

Last Working Version

_No response_

Claude Code Version

2.1.87 (Claude Code)

Platform

Anthropic API

Operating System

macOS

Terminal/Shell

iTerm2

Additional Information

_No response_