422 Unprocessable Entity

The request body was syntactically valid JSON but failed schema or business-logic validation. The errors array lists every validation failure — fix all of them before retrying.

Error shape


{
  "error": {
    "code": "validation_error",
    "message": "Request body validation failed.",
    "request_id": "req_01hwz3kj4p5qm8n9v2t6yr",
    "errors": [
      {
        "field": "daily_limit_usd",
        "message": "must be greater than 0",
        "value": -5
      },
      {
        "field": "scope",
        "message": "must be one of: org, team, key",
        "value": "global"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Common causes

Missing required field


{
  "errors": [{ "field": "provider", "message": "field is required" }]
}

Fix: Add the missing field to your request body. Check the API reference for the full schema.

Invalid model name


{
  "errors": [
    {
      "field": "model",
      "message": "Unknown model 'gpt5'. Did you mean 'gpt-4o'?",
      "value": "gpt5"
    }
  ]
}

Fix: Use a valid model name. The gateway passes model names through to the provider unchanged — check the provider’s model list for exact names. Common mistakes:

What you sent	What you meant
`gpt-4`	`gpt-4o` or `gpt-4-turbo`
`gpt5`	`gpt-4o` (GPT-5 not released)
`claude-3`	`claude-opus-4-5` or `claude-sonnet-4-5`
`claude-3-haiku`	`claude-haiku-4-5`

Invalid budget value


{
  "errors": [
    {
      "field": "daily_limit_usd",
      "message": "must be between 0.01 and 10000.0",
      "value": 0
    }
  ]
}

Fix: Set a budget between $0.01 and $10,000. Use null to remove a budget cap entirely.

Invalid scope


{
  "errors": [{ "field": "scope", "message": "must be one of: org, team, key" }]
}

Fix: Use one of the valid scope values: "org", "team", or "key".

PII scan — malformed request body


{
  "error": {
    "code": "validation_error",
    "message": "messages[0].content must be a string or array of content parts",
    "errors": [
      {
        "field": "messages[0].content",
        "message": "expected string or array, got number"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Fix: Ensure messages[].content is either a plain string or an array of content parts:


# Wrong
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": 42}]
 
# Correct (string)
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}]
 
# Correct (content parts array — for vision)
messages=[{
    "role": "user",
    "content": [
        {"type": "text", "text": "What is in this image?"},
        {"type": "image_url", "image_url": {"url": "data:image/png;base64,..."}}
    ]
}]

Debugging 422s

The errors array is exhaustive — all validation failures for the request are returned at once. Fix every item in the array before retrying; a partial fix will still return 422 for the remaining issues.


# Pretty-print the full error body
curl -s -X POST https://api.curate-me.ai/v1/admin/budgets \
  -H "X-CM-API-Key: $CM_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"daily_limit_usd": -5, "scope": "global"}' | jq '.error.errors'