We encountered an issue with the audio for your prompt — Veo 3.1 API blocked the video

Published 2026-09-23

raiMediaFilteredReasons Retry depends on cause

The exact error

We encountered an issue with the audio for your prompt, which means we could not create your video. This can sometimes happen due to our safety filters or other processing issues. Please modify your request and try again. You have not been charged for this attempt.

Veo 3.x generates a soundtrack with every video, and that audio goes through its own checks. When the audio step fails, the whole clip is dropped, even if the picture would have been fine. You get a completed operation with no video and this sentence as the reason.

What it means

Google’s Veo docs list this under Limitations as “Audio error”: Veo 3.1 “will sometimes block a video from generating because of safety filters or other processing issues with the audio”, and “you will not be charged if your video is blocked from generating.” The message covers two different causes, a safety filter on the audio or a plain processing failure, and it does not tell you which one happened.

The docs’ feature table lists audio as “Always on” for Veo 3.1, Veo 3.1 Fast, Veo 3.1 Lite and Veo 3. Every request produces audio, so every request can hit this, including prompts that never mention sound.

Users report many false positives. In js-genai issue #1272, the reporter says benign prompts with veo-3.1-generate-preview fail intermittently, that “the same prompt/image combination will sometimes pass and sometimes fail”, and that retrying the exact request 3 to 5 times usually produces at least one success. The issue was closed as not planned after it went stale, and later commenters report the same behavior. In forum thread 175949, a user on veo-3.1-generate-preview and veo-3.1-fast-generate-preview describes one clip failing three times in a row while they removed more content each time. They suspect shot composition that implies dialogue rather than the prompt wording. That is their guess, not a confirmed cause.

How to confirm it’s this

The operation is done with no error object, as the forum reporter describes.
No generated video is returned. In the raw response from issue #1272, raiMediaFilteredCount is 1 and raiMediaFilteredReasons holds this sentence.
The model is a Veo 3.x model with native audio.

If the reason talks about “Responsible AI practices”, celebrities or support codes instead, it is a different filter (see Related errors).

Fix

Handle it as a distinct outcome in code. Check for a missing video and read the filter reasons before indexing generated_videos, as described on the filtered-output page linked below. Match on this sentence so you can treat it differently from other filter reasons.
Check the prompt’s audio cues. Veo’s docs say the prompt “supports audio cues”, so dialogue, sound effects and ambient noise in your text shape the audio track. If the request really does ask for audio that could fall under a policy category, change that content. If it clearly does not, this is likely one of the false positives users report.
Do not count on switching audio off through the Gemini API. The forum user reports that generate_audio=False raises a ValueError on the Developer API saying it is “only supported in Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform mode”. They also report that negative_prompt is rejected once reference images are attached. Treat both as community reports and check the current SDK and docs.
Report reproducible false positives. A js-genai contributor in issue #1272 asked for the input image to reproduce it; keep prompts and inputs for any report you file.

Retry or not

Depends. A small, bounded number of identical retries is reasonable; a loop is not.

The case for retrying: Google’s own wording includes “other processing issues”, which is not about your content, and the issue #1272 reporter found identical retries often succeed. Their workaround was 5 attempts with a 3 second delay.

The case for stopping: the message itself says to “modify your request and try again”, and the forum reporter saw the same clip fail repeatedly. Google’s docs say blocked videos are not charged. Whether a blocked attempt counts against your requests-per-day quota is not stated in Google’s docs, but the forum user says it does: on their Tier 1 project, three failures on one clip used 30% of the day’s Veo requests. If that matches what you see in your usage page, every retry has a real cost on a small daily cap.

A sensible agent policy: retry the identical request once or twice, then stop and return a clear “audio filter” status with the reason text so a person can revise the prompt.

When it’s not this

videos were filtered out because they violated Google's Responsible AI practices. The general output filter on the video itself, not the audio.
The celebrity or likeness message. The input image was rejected; the fix is about the image, not about retrying.
Your use case is currently not supported. A 400 at submit time about the request’s parameters, not a filtered result.
A 429 quota error. If you have already used the day’s requests, you get a quota error at submit time instead of a completed operation.

Error text last verified against the sources below on 2026-09-23.