The situation:
Running knife ssh against multiple hosts with a sudo command (e.g. knife ssh 'chef_environment:blah' 'sudo uptime') failed with an ArgumentError, while the same command without sudo worked fine. The bug was in the ssh session handling when a pseudo-terminal was needed for sudo across multiple sessions. The failure only appeared with sudo because that is what forced the pty allocation across the sessions.
What actually fixes it (verified in the thread):
Fixed upstream in PR #11431, which is packaged into knife 17.3.48 and newer (and backported into still-supported chef 16.x lines like 16.16.13). Verify the knife gem version on your workstation and upgrade so knife is at 17.3.48 or newer. As a temporary workaround, adding the --require-pty flag to the knife ssh command raises an error if a pty cannot be requested, which surfaces the real problem instead of the ArgumentError.