Authenticate with vaults

Vaults and credentials are authentication primitives that let you register credentials for third-party services once and reference them by ID at session creation. This means you don't need to run your own secret store, transmit tokens on every call, or lose track of which end user an agent acted on behalf of.

The vault reference is a per-session parameter, so you can manage your product at the agent resource granularity and your users at the session resource granularity.

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Create a vault

A vault is the collection of credentials associated with an end user. Give it a display_name and optionally tag it with metadata so you can map it back to your own user records.

VAULT_ID=$(ant beta:vaults create \
  --display-name "Alice" \
  --metadata '{external_user_id: usr_abc123}' \
  --transform id --raw-output)
echo "$VAULT_ID"  # "vlt_01ABC..."

The response is the full vault record:

{
  "type": "vault",
  "id": "vlt_01ABC...",
  "display_name": "Alice",
  "metadata": { "external_user_id": "usr_abc123" },
  "created_at": "2026-03-18T10:00:00Z",
  "updated_at": "2026-03-18T10:00:00Z",
  "archived_at": null
}

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Add a credential

Two credential categories are supported:

• MCP credentials (mcp_oauth, static_bearer): each credential is keyed by an mcp_server_url. When the agent connects to a server at that URL at session runtime, the token is injected automatically.
• Environment variables (environment_variable): each credential is keyed by a secret_name (the environment variable name) and stored in the sandbox as an opaque placeholder. When the agent initiates an outbound request, the opaque placeholder is substituted with the real secret at egress. The agent never sees the secret value. Use this for any service that authenticates through an environment variable, such as CLIs, SDKs, or direct API calls.

The actual credential values you supply (token, access_token, refresh_token, client_secret, secret_value) are treated as sensitive, write-only fields and never returned in API responses.

CREDENTIAL_ID=$(ant beta:vaults:credentials create \
  --vault-id "$VAULT_ID" \
  --display-name "Alice's Slack" \
  --transform id --raw-output <<'YAML'
auth:
  type: mcp_oauth
  mcp_server_url: https://mcp.slack.com/mcp
  access_token: xoxp-...
  expires_at: "2099-12-31T23:59:59Z"