Safety classifier outage blocks ALL Bash/tool calls: "claude-opus-4-8 is temporarily unavailable, so auto mode cannot determine the safety of Bash"

Summary

In auto-approval (safe) permission mode, Claude Code refused every Bash command and every MCP computer/preview tool call for an extended period with:

claude-opus-4-8 is temporarily unavailable, so auto mode cannot determine the safety of Bash right now. Wait briefly and then try this action again. If it keeps failing, continue with other tasks that don't require this action and come back to it later. Note: reading files, searching code, and other read-only operations do not require the classifier and can still be used.

The safety/permission classifier (the model that decides whether a command is auto-approvable) appears to have been unavailable, and there is no fallback — so the agent could not run node --check, git, build commands, or drive the browser preview at all.

Impact

• All command-execution and browser/preview tooling was blocked, halting an active build/verify/deploy loop.
• Read-only tools (file read/search) kept working, so editing code continued — but nothing could be verified, committed, or built.
• The outage persisted across many retries and a full machine restart, then eventually recovered on its own.

Expected behavior

When the auto-approval safety classifier is temporarily unavailable, there should be a graceful fallback — e.g. fall back to an explicit per-command approval prompt (so the user can still authorize commands manually) rather than hard-refusing every command-execution tool until the classifier returns.

Steps to reproduce

1. Use Claude Code in the default auto-approval / "safe" permission mode.
2. During a window when the safety classifier model is unavailable, attempt any Bash command or MCP computer/preview tool call.
3. Every such call is refused with the message above; read-only file tools still work.

Environment

• Claude Code (CLI / agent), model claude-opus-4-8
• macOS (Darwin 25.5.0), Apple Silicon
• gh 2.93.0
• Permission mode: auto-approval ("auto mode")

Workaround used

Continued with read-only file edits only; deferred all node --check / git / build / preview steps until the classifier recovered.