Good morning. Can I connect a service account to motherduck MCP?

What are you trying to do? depending on the use case, using the MotherDuck CLI might easier and more flexible which agent client are you using? --- There's a straight forward way if your client supports bearer tokens, you can pass the SA token in the header:

{
  "headers": {
    "Authorization": "Bearer <your_SA_token>"
  }
}

I want to use chatGPT or Claude interface, but it requests the login directly

Oki. Yeah it's a bit annoying the way to get this to work at the moment. We are tracking improvements to support this use case, I've mentioned your case in our internal tracker 😊 . The way to get this to work it to configure the agent client to authenticate via a bearer token, and passing a SA token to that. If you use claude code or codex you can auth the MCP server with your SA token directly:

export MOTHERDUCK_TOKEN='<your-SA-token>'

codex mcp add motherduck-sa \
  --url https://api.motherduck.com/mcp \
  --bearer-token-env-var MOTHERDUCK_TOKEN

claude mcp add --transport http --scope user \
  motherduck-sa https://api.motherduck.com/mcp \
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer ${MOTHERDUCK_TOKEN}'

For Claude GUIs (desktop, web) you can also add a custom connector if your account supports configuring request headers. 1. On Customize > Connectors > Add custom connector. 2. Enter https://api.motherduck.com/mcp. 3. Choose No sign-in. 4. Under Request headers, add: ◦ Name: Authorization ◦ Value: Bearer <your-SA-token> 5. Save. If your account doesn't support the headers yet, for Claude Desktop only it's also possible to add a local redirect by adding the following to your claude_desktop_config.json.

"mcpServers": {
    "MotherDuck (prod)": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "mcp-remote",
        "https://api.motherduck.com/mcp",
        "--header",
        "Authorization: Bearer <your-SA-token>"
      ]
    }
  },

Finally (😅), for ChatGPT you need to create a custom MCP app (docs), and choose "Access token /API key" auth method. I think that option might only be available for some accounts though...

I'll try the custom one using the MD - i think it'll be better. I'll try it

Perfe, let us know how i goes! We're doing a cleanup of our docs regarding this 🙂

(We've improved our docs in this area https://motherduck.com/docs/key-tasks/ai-and-motherduck/mcp-workflows/connect-with-access-token/, let us know if you have any feedback!)