ChatGPT o1-preview model asking me a random "challenge question" before helping me troubleshoot my code

This is the second time this has happened, where I have asked for help and it required me to first answer a challenge question to proceed.

Has this ever happened to anyone else? It doesn’t bother me, just a little unusual. Is this likely an o1-specific hallucination or has it been instructed to do this by OpenAI to prevent 3rd party automation of ChatGPT?

This was its thought process.