Invalid nameid policy with Cognito

IHAC who is getting an unsatisfied nameid policy error. The issue is because the external authentication provider using saml requires the unspecified format for NameID but it seems Cognito only supports the Persistent format. Is there a workaround for this issue? I was thinking of having the customer create a custom attribute, set that custom attribute to unspecified, put the nameID info in that attribute, then use that custom attribute instead of the nameID. However, the customer doesn't want to go down this path.