I tend to agree with Steven and David here. You define __getattribute__ and so that's the behaviour you get when an attribute of the class is requested (whether by the system or by your code). The documentation (here: https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html#object.__getattribute__) seems to support this view as well.

Do you have a real-world example of code that is broken by this behaviour, or is this just a theoretical problem? Is it particularly hard to make the code work the way you want it to with the current behaviour? For example,

    # Don't intercept __class__
    if attr == "__class__":
        return object.__getattribute__(self, attr)