Claude Scheduled Task Runs Rogue for 8.5 Hours, Ignoring Stop Button
Nishil20 · reddit · 2026-08-01
A developer shared a frustrating bug with Claude's Scheduled Tasks on the Max 5x plan. An Opus task designed to fetch Gmail and Calendar data every morning failed because the tools were approval-gated, with no one around to click approve.
While the model correctly identified the issue and stopped making tool calls, the scheduler kept re-prompting it. This resulted in the task looping for 8.5 hours, repeatedly sending the growing transcript to Opus and generating the same failure conclusion. Furthermore, the user reported that clicking the "Stop" button did nothing, and the session eventually died with an API Error: 400 due to message corruption.
The author advises against attaching approval-gated tools to scheduled tasks, recommends using Sonnet over Opus, and calls for runtime caps and a functional stop button.
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