claude-code - 💡(How to fix) Fix [BUG] Auto mode blocked by persistent "safety classifier temporarily unavailable" outage — Edit/Write/Bash all fail [1 participants]

Preflight Checklist

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

What's Wrong?

In an active Claude Code session with auto mode enabled, every call to Edit, Write, and Bash has been failing for ~30+ minutes with this error:

claude-opus-4-6[1m] is temporarily unavailable, so auto mode cannot determine the safety of Edit 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.

The same error triggers for Bash and Write. Read-only tools (Read, Grep, Glob, WebFetch) continue to work normally.

Impact

The assistant cannot make any file changes or run any shell commands. This means real work (editing a CSS file, creating new components, running a dev server, gh issue create, etc.) is fully blocked even though the user has explicitly authorized the work via approved plans + auto mode.

What Should Happen?

When the auto-mode safety classifier is unavailable, Claude Code should not hard-fail every write/exec tool call. Any one of these would be an acceptable degradation:

1. Graceful fallback to confirm-per-action. Treat classifier-unavailable as equivalent to "needs user confirmation" — surface a single approval prompt per tool call and let the user override, instead of blocking the tool entirely. This matches how the app already handles tools that aren't pre-approved.
2. Clear status + ETA surfacing. If the classifier is down, show a session-level banner with a status indicator and an approximate ETA (e.g. "Classifier degraded — retrying in 2m"), so users can decide whether to wait, switch mode, or abort. Right now the only signal is a per-call error that looks transient but persists for 30+ minutes.
3. Automatic drop from auto mode to default. If the classifier fails more than N times in a row within a short window, automatically exit auto mode back to the default permission mode and notify the user in the UI, so work resumes under standard per-action confirmations without a full restart.

Additionally, the error message itself should be accurate — it currently references claude-opus-4-6[1m] as the unavailable model even when the user has explicitly selected Opus 4.7. That string should reflect the actual classifier model, or be generalized (e.g. "safety classifier temporarily unavailable") to avoid implying the user-selected model is the problem.

Today, the classifier outage functionally bricks the session: no edits, no shell, no Agent delegation (sub-agents hit the same block). Read-only tools continue to work, which confirms the rest of the pipeline is healthy — only the safety-review path is blocked.

Error Messages/Logs

Error: claude-opus-4-6[1m] 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.

Steps to Reproduce

These steps describe the exact session state that triggered it and the diagnostic signals the Anthropic team can match against their logs.

1. Launch Claude Code against any local Next.js repo (not required, but mirrors what I was doing — any codebase works).
2. Enable auto mode (/auto or via CLI flag). Confirm the "Auto mode active" system-reminder appears.
3. Confirm model is Opus 4.7 via /model — the session header shows "Opus 4.7 (1M context)".
4. Ask the assistant to make a substantive change (in my case: extending app/globals.css with ~60 lines of new CSS variables and utility classes). Approve the plan if in plan mode so auto-mode execution begins.
5. The assistant invokes the Edit tool with a normal, non-destructive diff.
6. Instead of the edit applying, the tool returns this exact error text (captured verbatim from the session):

claude-opus-4-6[1m] is temporarily unavailable, so auto mode cannot determine the safety of Edit 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. 7. Retry the same Edit 5–10 times over 10+ minutes — same error every time. 8. Try the same change via a general-purpose sub-agent (Agent tool). Sub-agent fails with the same underlying classifier block and returns: "The safety classifier was unavailable when reviewing this sub-agent's work". 9. Try Bash (e.g. gh auth status) — same error with "safety of Bash" in the text. 10. Try Write on a brand-new file — same error. 11. Try Read / Grep / Glob / WebFetch — all succeed normally, confirming only the safety-review path is degraded, not the overall session.

Diagnostic signals to match in logs:

• Affected tools: Edit, Write, Bash, Agent (sub-agent dispatch)
• Unaffected tools: Read, Grep, Glob, WebFetch, Skill, TaskCreate/Update, ScheduleWakeup
• Error string references model id claude-opus-4-6[1m] as the classifier, even though the user-selected model is claude-opus-4-7
• Session persisted through multiple /model toggles and multiple scheduled ScheduleWakeup retries — none resolved it.

Minimum repro attempt (if classifier is currently healthy, this will just work):

mkdir -p /tmp/claude-classifier-repro && cd /tmp/claude-classifier-repro echo ":root { --x: red; }" > test.css

Then ask Claude Code in auto mode: "edit test.css to change --x to blue". Expected when healthy: edit applies. Observed during outage: the classifier-unavailable error above.

Claude Model

None

Is this a regression?

Yes, this worked in a previous version

Last Working Version

No response

Claude Code Version

2.1.112 (Claude Code)

Platform

Anthropic API

Operating System

macOS

Terminal/Shell

Terminal.app (macOS)

Additional Information

No response