Account deactivated for “prohibited biological use” after pasting a published red-teaming challenge brief into Codex

AI safety research is my primary occupation. Adversarial testing of frontier models is routine work for me, and I have never had an account issue before — this is the first time anything I’ve done has been flagged at all, let alone escalated.
What happened
I take part in public adversarial-robustness competitions. The competition in question was indirectly sponsored by OpenAI, and it was about indirect prompt injection: whether a model can be manipulated into unintended actions through instructions injected into content it processes. It was not about biological capability in any sense.
One of the objectives involved getting a model to make a single tool call that sets a pH parameter to a low value in a simulated environment. One tool call, one number. That was the entire success condition.
While working on it, I pasted the organisers’ published brief into Codex twice. Both requests were blocked by the biological-use safeguard — which is fine, that is what it is there for. My account was then permanently deactivated for “prohibited biological use.” No warning, no intermediate step.
One thing worth being clear about
Codex was not the target model. The models under test sat inside the competition environment. Codex was the assistant I used to draft and refine my submissions, the same way I’d use it for any development work. I made no attempt to bypass its safeguards, extract restricted output from it, or probe OpenAI systems.
Why I think this is a false positive rather than a judgement call
No pathogen, toxin or biological agent was involved anywhere. No synthesis or procedural information was sought, and none could have been produced — inducing a simulated tool call that sets a pH value yields no biological content whether the request completes or not. The text was written by the organisers, not by me.
I can see why the classifier fired. An instruction to damage crops next to strong acidification is a reasonable surface heuristic for agricultural sabotage, and I would rather it over-trigger than under-trigger. But the outcome here was not a blocked request. It was permanent loss of the account.
Where the appeals went
First appeal: denied, with a note that no further appeals would be considered. Support then asked me to verify account ownership by signing in — not possible, since the account is deactivated — and the Help Center chat requires a signed-in session. Support twice directed me back to the appeal form. I submitted there with full context; rejection came back within seconds.
What I’m asking
Has anyone here had a bio-category deactivation actually reversed? I’m specifically interested in what channel worked, and whether anything external was involved — an employer, a platform, a confirmation from a third party.
Not looking to vent about the ban. I’m trying to work out whether there is a path here or whether the answer is genuinely no.