claude-code - 💡(How to fix) Fix [Bug] File Read Encoding Corruption Triggers False Positive Usage Policy Block [1 comments, 2 participants]

Bug Description Bug report: What happened: During a long working session, I asked Claude Code to enter plan mode and consolidate previous analysis into a plan. Claude Code read 3 files in parallel. The output of that read operation became completely corrupted — the terminal showed garbled text consisting of random characters, I/ sequences, non-UTF8 bytes, and repeating IIII patterns. Immediately after the corrupted output, Claude Code returned the following error and blocked the session entirely:

API Error: Claude Code is unable to respond to this request, which appears to violate our Usage Policy (https://www.anthropic.com/legal/aup). Please double press esc to edit your last message or start a new session.

Root cause (suspected): The corrupted output from the file read was interpreted by the model as policy-violating content, triggering a false positive. The files being read were source code files (Node.js index.js and log files). No policy-violating content was present — the corruption was caused by encoding issues during file reading, not by the actual file content. Steps to reproduce:

Run a long multi-step session with several file reads and agent spawns Ask Claude Code to read multiple files in parallel that may contain non-UTF8 content or binary fragments Observe corrupted output in terminal Claude Code blocks with Usage Policy error

Expected behavior: Claude Code should handle corrupted or unreadable file content gracefully without triggering a Usage Policy block. Actual behavior: Session blocked. Required full restart. All pending context lost. Version: 2.1.87 (Claude Code) OS: Windows Session length at time of error: ~45 minutes

❯ /plan ⎿ Enabled plan mode

❯ vi que no estabas en modo plan, mete todo esto en un plan

● Entendido. Activo el flujo de plan formalmente. Ya tengo mucho contexto pero voy a verificar los archivos críticos para confirmar los detalles exactos antes de escribir el plan.

Read 3 files (ctrl+o to expand)

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2/ 0/

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Environment Info

• Platform: win32
• Terminal: windows-terminal
• Version: 2.1.87
• Feedback ID: b1d96860-cd0b-48a7-bd53-1ac17b59c83a

Errors

[{"error":"ENOENT: no such file or directory, unlink 'C:\\Users\\BRYANQ~1\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\claude\\C--Users-BryanQuiceno-Documents-TitanProject-TitanVersionPLC-AppMovilSIGER-server\\db614886-6719-4f82-bf2d-aea5b6710f51\\tasks\\a44e893b90962ece4.output'","timestamp":"2026-04-10T06:07:41.266Z"},{"error":"ENOENT: no such file or directory, unlink 'C:\\Users\\BRYANQ~1\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\claude\\C--Users-BryanQuiceno-Documents-TitanProject-TitanVersionPLC-AppMovilSIGER-server\\db614886-6719-4f82-bf2d-aea5b6710f51\\tasks\\a9c769e228fd19fd3.output'","timestamp":"2026-04-10T06:08:03.594Z"},{"error":"ENOENT: no such file or direct…

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