Raised when the interpreter finds an internal error, but the situation does not look so serious to cause it to abandon all hope. The associated value is a string indicating what went wrong (in low-level terms). In CPython, this could be raised by incorrectly using Python’s C API, such as returning a NULL value without an exception set.
If you’re confident that this exception wasn’t your fault, or the fault of a package you’re using, you should report this to the author or maintainer of your Python interpreter. Be sure to report the version of the Python interpreter (sys.version; it is also printed at the start of an interactive Python session), the exact error message (the exception’s associated value) and if possible the source of the program that triggered the error.