Safety filter blocks that show as "Bot failed to respond"

Update, Oct 10: Staff confirmed a second trigger this morning, biology and life-science research. Colin said "some scientific topics, especially in biology and the life sciences, can trip it even for legitimate research," and that "a new bot can also run into the same filter if its conversation covers similar biology material." Keep stuck Bots. There isn't a way in the app to remove only the blocked part.

• Status: Open. Staff passed the new cases to the team at 6:43 and 6:45 AM ET on Oct 10, including that the app shows only a generic error. No fix date.
• First seen: Oct 8, in a forum report posted at 7:18 PM ET. Staff traced that Bot's failures back to 11:49 AM ET.
• Symptoms: One Bot answers every message with "Bot failed to respond." Other Bots reply normally unless they handle the same material.
• Workaround: Do new work in another Bot, and don't delete the blocked one.

Grok Bot can show its generic Bot failed to respond error when the model provider's safety filter refuses a reply, staff confirmed on the Cursor forum. In the reported case, staff member kevinn said the filter was flagging "something in this bot's conversation history as sensitive security content." Since "every new message is sent together with that history," every reply gets refused.

The user who reported it said the likely trigger was a conversation about an AI vulnerability scanning tool. A second Bot of his that saw the same topic failed too, and another user said he has the same issue.

Why it matters#

It looks exactly like the outage errors from Oct 6 to Oct 8, which are now fixed, but the fix is different. Staff said restarting, rebooting, or a Reset of the Bot's computer won't help, because the problem sits in the chat history.

How to use it#

1. Check whether it's one Bot or all of them. If all fail, check status.cursor.com instead.
2. If only one fails, stop resending. Each retry sends the same history.
3. Give the task to another Bot, or a new one, from scratch.
4. To get the blocked Bot back, ask on the forum and include its conversation ID. Right-click the Bot in the sidebar and choose Copy conversation ID, as staff asked in another thread.

A starting message for the new Bot (our wording):

Start fresh on this task. Don't open, read, or summarize any of my other Bots' chats. Here's what I need: <task>

Good to know#

• Don't ask another Bot to "read, summarize or continue" the blocked Bot's chat. Staff warned that "can carry the same content over and get that bot blocked too."
• Nothing is lost. Staff said the Bot's "history, memory and routines are all still there, and nothing has been deleted."
• There's no way yet to remove only the blocked part of a chat, staff said: "today there isn't a way in the app."
• Our read: if you work on security tools or biology research, keep that work in its own Bot, so a block can't take your main Bot with it.
• We didn't reproduce this. It rests on three staff posts and four user reports across three threads.