Remote MCP Servers With API Keys: What Works in 6 Clients (2026)
Disclosure: I work on Pink Agentic AI Payments at PinkWallet; it's used as the example in the last section. Short answer: every client below can send a custom header (or a key baked into the URL) to a remote Streamable HTTP MCP server — except Claude Desktop's built-in "custom connectors," which only walks you through OAuth and has no field for a static token. If your server auths with a plain API key, either issue OAuth in front of it, or bridge it through mcp-remote for Desktop; every other client here (Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, the OpenAI Agents SDK, LangChain) takes a headers object or
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