Production code on a pinned replicate-python 1.0.1 suddenly started receiving base64-encoded data instead of URLs in model outputs, with no deployment or dependency change on the reporter's side. Maintainer nickstenning explained the sequencing mistake: the 1.0 client sends Prefer: wait, and Replicate finished rolling out server support for it, which changed the output format for data URLs. Replicate rolled the API behavior back and wrote up the incident on their blog. In 1.0.0+, run() returns a FileOutput file-like object by default, and you can pass use_file_output=False to get raw model output.