False-positive 'Output blocked by content filtering policy' during benign LaTeX/Greek transcription task

Status Open
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 1 comment · opened Aug 3, 2026

Description

Repeatedly hitting API Error: Output blocked by content filtering policy (UI shows "Request was blocked — This request triggered safety guardrails") mid-session, on a task that is unambiguously benign: transcribing a public-domain 1889 English translation of Aristotle's Organon (Owen edition) into a LaTeX reading edition.

Context when it happens

  • Task: continuing an in-progress page-by-page transcription (one LaTeX fragment + JSON sidecar per page, committed to git after each page).
  • The specific page being processed when the block first fired included:
  • A polytonic Greek footnote quotation (Aristotle, Posterior Analytics i.2).
  • A hand-built TikZ diagram (a classical "square of opposition" logic diagram, after Aldrich) with rotated Greek labels (ἀντιφατικῶς, ἀντικείμεναι, ὑπαλλήλοι, ὑπεναντίαι, Ἐναντίαι) at various angles.
  • The block recurred multiple times in a row when retrying the same continuation (moving on to transcribe the next page, plain English prose, no diagram).

Why this looks like a false positive

  • The content is a straightforward historical-text transcription task (public domain 1889 translation), with heavy use of polytonic Greek Unicode and TikZ/LaTeX markup — nothing resembling disallowed content.
  • My working theory (unconfirmed, since I have no visibility into the classifier) is that dense runs of Greek diacritics combined with TikZ escape-heavy syntax may be triggering a pattern-based false positive, rather than anything semantic.

Impact

Blocks an otherwise-normal autonomous documentation/transcription workflow; had to stop and ask the user to retry / rewind multiple times.

Request

Would appreciate someone taking a look at what specifically triggered the classifier here, since the content itself is clearly benign (academic transcription of a 137-year-old public-domain text).

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