False-positive Usage Policy block in long technical session

Resolved 💬 1 comment Opened Jun 5, 2026 by maxsimov Closed Jul 11, 2026

What happened

During a long Claude Code session focused on gzip decoder
performance benchmarking
(comparing libz inflate call patterns,
measuring single-thread throughput against /usr/bin/gunzip,
profiling with samply), the assistant's response was blocked with:

API Error: Claude Code is unable to respond to this request, which appears to violate our Usage Policy (https://www.anthropic.com/legal/aup).

Request ID: req_011CbjPcd2d94ZtxuHRQw3Fw

Context

Pure performance engineering work on my own machine against
my own test files:

  • Building Apple's open-source gzip 479 from

apple-oss-distributions/file_cmds to compare wall clock vs
the shipped /usr/bin/gunzip.

  • Profiling decoder backends (libz, libdeflate, zune-inflate,

miniz_oxide, libdeflate-zran).

  • Measuring write(2) syscall throughput, BufWriter chunk

sizes, F_NOCACHE (the macOS analog of O_DIRECT).

  • Discussing kernel pagecache writeback behavior and inflate's

inner-loop cache behavior.

No security testing, no offensive use, no third-party systems
involved. Vocabulary that I suspect tripped the classifier:
"bypass the unified buffer cache", "O_DIRECT", "raw FFI", "sidestep",
"manually parse the gzip header" — all standard systems-programming
language being used in context.

Ask

If possible, please investigate the Request ID above and tune
the classifier to be less sensitive to systems-internals
vocabulary when the surrounding context is clearly performance
benchmarking. A retry of the same prompt would also help — I
don't know if a re-send went through (I didn't try; the assistant
moved on after I asked about the error).

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