API Keys

Overview

API keys authenticate your requests to the Mixedbread API. Every key belongs to an organization and inherits its Stores, billing, and limits. Pass a key as a bearer token:

curl https://api.mixedbread.com/v1/stores \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $MXBAI_API_KEY"

Create and manage keys on the API Keys page of your dashboard.

Access modes

When you create a key you choose how much of the API it can reach:

Full access — the key can use every endpoint available to the organization. This is the default.
Custom — the key carries a list of scopes, and every request is checked against them. Anything you do not grant is refused.

A custom key is the right choice whenever a key leaves your own backend: a search-only key for a client-side app, a write-only key for an ingestion pipeline, or a key that may answer questions but never delete a Store.

Available scopes

Scope	Grants	Applies to
List stores	View the Stores in the organization	Organization-wide
Create store	Create new Stores	Organization-wide
Read store	View files and chunks in a Store	Selected Stores or all
Write store	Upload and modify files in a Store	Selected Stores or all
Delete store	Delete Stores	Selected Stores or all
Search store	Read a Store's indexed content: search, agentic search, grep, list chunks, question answering, metadata facets, and query enhancement	Selected Stores or all
Completions	Use the Chat Completions and Responses APIs	Organization-wide

Scoping to specific Stores

Read store, Write store, Delete store, and Search store can be granted either across every Store in the organization or against an explicit list of Stores. A key restricted to a list may only touch those Stores — a request naming any other Store is refused, and so is a request that names no Store at all, since there is nothing to match the grant against.

Grant a scope organization-wide when the key should keep working for Stores you create later; grant it per Store when the key belongs to one workload.

The completions scope

The Completions scope gates the agent-facing endpoints, separately from anything a key may do with Stores:

Method	Endpoints
`create`	`POST /v1/chat/completions`, `POST /v1/responses`
`read`	`GET /v1/chat/completions`, `GET /v1/chat/completions/{id}`, `GET /v1/chat/completions/{id}/turns`, `GET /v1/chat/completions/{id}/messages`, `GET /v1/responses/{id}`, `GET /v1/responses/{id}/input_items`
`delete`	`DELETE /v1/chat/completions/{id}`, `DELETE /v1/responses/{id}`

The dashboard exposes this as a single Completions checkbox, which grants all three methods together.

The Completions scope is independent of the Store scopes. A key that may run completions still needs Search store on a Store before the hosted search tools can retrieve from it, and a key with only Completions can generate but never search.

Keys created before the Completions scope existed keep working unchanged: scope-restricted keys were granted all three completions methods, and full-access keys were never restricted in the first place.

Scopes over the API

The /v1/api-keys endpoint takes the same scopes as a list of entries. Each entry has a method, a resource_type of store or completions, and a resource_id that names one Store or is null for organization-wide:

{
  "name": "Search and answer",
  "scope": [
    { "method": "search", "resource_type": "store", "resource_id": "8f2b…" },
    { "method": "create", "resource_type": "completions", "resource_id": null },
    { "method": "read", "resource_type": "completions", "resource_id": null }
  ]
}

Omit scope entirely to create a full-access key.

null and an empty list both create a full-access key — an empty array is stored as "no restrictions", not as "no permissions". To lock a key down, send the scopes you want to grant; there is no way to express a key that may do nothing.

When a scope is missing

A request the key's scopes do not cover fails with 403 and the error code permission_denied_error, naming the scope that was missing:

{
  "type": "permission_denied_error",
  "code": "permission_denied_error",
  "message": "This API key is missing the create scope for completions."
}

Scopes are fixed when the key is created. To change what a key may do, create a replacement with the scopes you want and revoke the old one.