This error was added in https://bugs.python.org/issue33018 . See some discussion on that issue.

Note that first arg needs to be a type (i.e. instance of `type`) to avoid this error:

[ins] In [41]: class C(ABC):0

[ins] In [42]: issubclass(dict, C)
Out[42]: False

[ins] In [43]: issubclass('', C)  # TypeError: issubclass() arg 1 must be a class

[ins] In [44]: issubclass(typing.Dict, C)   # same error as above