diff --git a/src/gateway/live-agent-probes.test.ts b/src/gateway/live-agent-probes.test.ts
index 70d077149ec..6bda311c3ff 100644
--- a/src/gateway/live-agent-probes.test.ts
+++ b/src/gateway/live-agent-probes.test.ts
@@ -19,7 +19,13 @@ describe("live-agent-probes", () => {
 
   it("accepts only cat for the shared image probe reply", () => {
     expect(() => assertLiveImageProbeReply("cat")).not.toThrow();
+    expect(() =>
+      assertLiveImageProbeReply(
+        "model metadata for `gpt-5.5` not found. defaulting to fallback metadata; this can degrade performance and cause issues.cat",
+      ),
+    ).not.toThrow();
     expect(() => assertLiveImageProbeReply("horse")).toThrow("image probe expected 'cat'");
+    expect(() => assertLiveImageProbeReply("caterpillar")).toThrow("image probe expected 'cat'");
   });
 
   it("builds a retryable cron prompt with provider-specific fallback wording", () => {
diff --git a/src/gateway/live-agent-probes.ts b/src/gateway/live-agent-probes.ts
index b7f0012064d..e4e45586e34 100644
--- a/src/gateway/live-agent-probes.ts
+++ b/src/gateway/live-agent-probes.ts
@@ -33,7 +33,7 @@ export function isClaudeLikeLiveAgent(raw: string): boolean {
 
 export function assertLiveImageProbeReply(text: string): void {
   const normalized = normalizeOptionalLowercaseString(text);
-  if (normalized !== "cat") {
+  if (normalized !== "cat" && !/(^|[^a-z])cat[.!?`'")\]]*$/.test(normalized ?? "")) {
     throw new Error(`image probe expected 'cat', got: ${normalized}`);
   }
 }