Found this on a different forum
If you’re wondering why that leading zero is important, it’s because
permissions are set as an octal integer, and Python automagically
treats any integer with a leading zero as octal. So os.chmod(“file”,
484) (in decimal) would give the same result.
What you are doing is passing 664
which in octal is 1230
In your case you would need
os.chmod("/tmp/test_file", 436)
[Update] Note, for Python 3 you have prefix with 0o (zero oh). E.G, 0o666