openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix [Bug]: Isolated agentTurn cron jobs fail with gzip JSON parse error (SyntaxError: Unexpected token \u001f) on github-copilot provider since v2026.5.11 [1 comments, 2 participants]

Summary

Isolated agentTurn cron jobs systematically fail with a gzip JSON parse error when using the github-copilot provider. The error has been occurring consistently since approximately 2026-05-11 (KST), affecting all isolated session cron jobs. systemEvent + main session jobs are unaffected.

This appears to be the same compressed-response parsing class as #81865 and #79752, but specifically on the github-copilot provider's isolated cron run path.

Environment

• OpenClaw: latest available (no newer version exists as of 2026-05-19)
• macOS host (Apple Silicon, Darwin 25.5.0 arm64)
• Node: v26.0.0
• Provider: github-copilot
• Models affected: github-copilot/claude-sonnet-4.6, github-copilot/gemini-3-flash-preview (both fail)
• Session target: isolated (agentTurn)

Symptoms

All isolated agentTurn cron jobs fail immediately (within ~1 second) with:

SyntaxError: Unexpected token '\u001f', "\u001f\ufffd\b\u0000\u0000\u0000\u0000\u0000\u0000\u0003"... is not valid JSON

The \u001f\u008b prefix is the gzip magic byte sequence. The isolated agent runtime is receiving a gzip-compressed HTTP response from the github-copilot provider and attempting to parse it directly as JSON without decompressing first.

Timeline

• Before 2026-05-11: Jobs ran successfully using fallbackUsed: true (primary model claude-sonnet-4.6 failing quietly, fallback to gemini succeeding)
• 2026-05-11 onwards: Even the fallback model (gemini-3-flash-preview) fails — FallbackSummaryError: All models failed (2)
• Workaround applied: Converted all isolated agentTurn jobs to systemEvent + main session type

Affected jobs (all isolated agentTurn)

• US market closing report (Tue-Sat 06:00 KST) — 5 consecutive errors
• Daily weather briefing (Tue-Fri 06:20 KST) — 4 consecutive errors
• Kioxia news automation (weekdays 07:30 KST) — 3 consecutive errors
• Daily team retrospective log (23:50 KST) — 2 consecutive errors
• Daily workspace Git backup (00:00 KST) — 1 error

Not affected

• systemEvent + sessionTarget: main jobs — all working normally
• agentTurn + sessionTarget: isolated job using github-copilot/gemini-3-flash-preview that ran on 2026-05-05 (Mon weather, ran once successfully, not triggered since)

Expected behavior

Isolated agentTurn cron jobs should decompress gzip-encoded HTTP responses before JSON parsing, consistent with how main session requests are handled.

Actual behavior

The isolated session runner receives a gzip-compressed response body and passes it directly to JSON.parse(), causing an immediate SyntaxError with binary gzip magic bytes visible in the error message.

Evidence

Run history from a single job showing the transition from success to failure:

2026-05-08: status=ok, model=gemini-3-flash-preview, fallbackUsed=true, durationMs=35936
2026-05-09: status=ok, model=gemini-3-flash-preview, fallbackUsed=true, durationMs=29573
2026-05-11: status=error, FallbackSummaryError: All models failed (2): github-copilot/gemini-3-flash-preview: ... (auth) | github-copilot/claude-sonnet-4.6: ... (auth)
2026-05-12: status=error, SyntaxError: Unexpected token '\u001f' ...
2026-05-13: status=error (same)
2026-05-19: status=error (same)

Note: fallbackUsed: true in pre-failure runs suggests claude-sonnet-4.6 was already silently failing on the github-copilot provider path before the full breakage.

Suspected root cause

The github-copilot provider API endpoint began returning gzip-compressed responses around 2026-05-11. The isolated agentTurn session runner does not handle Content-Encoding: gzip decompression, unlike the main session path. This is likely the same underlying class as #79752 / #81865.

Workaround

Converting isolated agentTurn jobs to systemEvent + sessionTarget: main avoids the isolated runner's HTTP path entirely and resolves the issue.