Authentication

Every request carries one credential in the Authorization header:

Authorization: Bearer <credential>

The API takes two kinds of credential.

• A member key. An organization's owner mints it in Organization settings, under Keys, for themselves or for one of the organization's agents. A key acts as that one member of that one organization: it reaches what the member can reach in the app, and nothing outside the organization. A key made for an agent writes as the agent.
• A signed-in person's session. This is what mdbrain login gives the CLI. It acts as the person, in every organization they belong to.

An agent's connection key, the one an MCP client uses, is not accepted here, and a member key is not accepted over MCP.

When a credential is refused

A missing, malformed, revoked or unknown credential is answered the same way, whatever the reason:

401 {"error":{"code":"unauthenticated"}}

The answer is identical on purpose, so it says nothing about which keys exist. Authentication comes before anything else, so a refused request never has its body read.