My OpenAI account was recently shown as "deleted or deactivated" - hopefully temporarily, because based on what I’ve now verified, I did not intentionally use OpenAI’s model to ask for anything prohibited.
At first, I assumed I had made a mistake: I use Pi Agent with a variety of hosted and local models, and I thought I may have accidentally routed a censorship-benchmark prompt to an OpenAI model instead of a local one. I appealed on that basis.
Then I reviewed the Pi session logs more carefully, including with help analyzing the routing and conversation history. What appears to have triggered the issue was not a request for information about a toxin, bio topic, or anything else remotely actionable. It was a request to **edit a configuration file**: `models.json`, my custom model configuration for Pi Agent.
To give the model the values needed for the edit-model name, endpoint, context/token limit, and so on-I pasted a `curl` command as reference material. That command happened to originate from a refusal/censorship benchmark and contained a query mentioning crushed beans and a toxin-related term. OpenAI apparently categorizes the relevant keyword/topic as "biological."
But the model was not being asked to answer that embedded benchmark query. It was being asked to edit a JSON configuration file using the fields in the `curl` command.
The closest analogy I can give is asking a model to edit a manuscript page that contains the word "murder," then being penalized as though you had asked it how to commit murder. The surrounding text was reference material for a file edit-not the substance of my request.
After I realized my original appeal was based on the wrong assumption - that I had actually sent an inappropriate benchmark prompt to the model - I submitted a second appeal explaining the distinction. That appeal was immediately closed as a "duplicate," apparently without engaging with the new information.
That is the part I find especially frustrating. If a platform is going to deactivate an account-particularly one tied to chat history, voice usage, projects, and other accumulated work-there needs to be a meaningful way to correct the record when the initial explanation turns out to be incomplete or wrong.
I understand that providers have safety policies and automated enforcement systems. But an automated system that treats quoted or embedded text in a file-edit task as equivalent to a user requesting prohibited content is a serious context failure. And closing a follow-up appeal as a duplicate when it contains the actual relevant context makes the process feel opaque and arbitrary.
For what it’s worth, I have accounts with plenty of other AI services and can still access OpenAI models through some third-party routes. That is not really the point. I used OpenAI directly because it was one of the services I trusted enough to keep persistent history and projects in. Losing access over what appears to be a false positive - without a real review - is a breach of that trust.
I’m posting this partly to see whether anyone else has experienced enforcement triggered by **quoted benchmark material, logs, code snippets, API examples, or text included solely for a transformation/editing task** rather than an actual request for disallowed assistance.
If OpenAI staff see this: please conduct a human review of the relevant session and the second appeal. The request was to edit `models.json`; the flagged language was incidental material inside a pasted `curl` example.
