[Bug]: Crawl returning 'str' object has no attribute 'choices

[jacobshenn]

crawl4ai version

0.5.0

Expected Behavior

Return a normal crawl matching my schema.

Current Behavior

I am crawling a set of about 600 links. For some links, the crawl works perfectly, but for others, the crawler returns:
[
{
"index": 0,
"error": true,
"tags": [
"error"
],
"content": "'str' object has no attribute 'choices'"
}
]

there is no pattern for which links the crawler returns this for which makes me wonder whether this is an API issue. Has anyone seen or encountered this bug?

Is this reproducible?

Yes

Inputs Causing the Bug

Steps to Reproduce

Code snippets

OS

mac)S

Python version

3.13

Browser

Chrome

Browser version

No response

Error logs & Screenshots (if applicable)

No response

[RaccoonOnion]

Same here. Using deepseek chat API

[jacobshenn]

Same here. Using deepseek chat API

Hey! Thanks for replying. Are you using the deepseek API inside crawl4ai? or are you using it standalone?

• Thanks

[RaccoonOnion]

Same here. Using deepseek chat API

Hey! Thanks for replying. Are you using the deepseek API inside crawl4ai? or are you using it standalone?

• Thanks

Inside LLMExtractionStrategy as:

llm_strategy = LLMExtractionStrategy(
    llm_config=LLMConfig(provider="deepseek/deepseek-chat", api_token=os.getenv("DEEPSEEK_API")),
    schema=LeaderboardEntry.model_json_schema(),
    extraction_type="schema",
    instruction=INSTRUCTION_TO_LLM,
    chunk_token_threshold=1000,
    overlap_rate=0.0,
    apply_chunking=True,
    input_format="markdown",
    extra_args={"temperature": 0.0, "max_tokens": 2048},
)

[jacobshenn]

I'm running my API's through openrouter and getting this error.

`
llm_strategy = LLMExtractionStrategy(
llm_config=LLMConfig(
provider="deepseek/deepseek-chat",
api_token="os.getenv("openrouter")),
base_url="https://openrouter.ai/api/v1",

    )`

Output:

{'index': 0, 'error': True, 'tags': ['error'], 'content': 'litellm.BadRequestError: DeepseekException - {"error":{"message":"deepseek-chat is not a valid model ID","code":400},"user_id":"user_2th1C5iID3WInICREZPY1NCmXhb"}'}

Have you ran into this at all?

[dhruvthak3r]

Yes, I'm facing the same issue with DeepSeek model through groq Api