Provider accounts

A provider account is one credential you’ve connected for a model provider — either an API key you paste or an account you sign in to (OAuth, e.g. Claude). You can connect more than one account per provider (for example two Claude subscriptions) and control which one each machine and session uses.

Everything on this page lives under Settings → Providers in the mobile or desktop app.

Add an API key

Open Settings → Providers and tap Connect (or open a provider and tap Add account).
Pick the provider.
Give the account a name (e.g. “Personal”, “Work”) — optional; a default name is filled in.
Paste the API key.
Tap Validate & Save.

Before saving, Consortium verifies the key directly with the provider (the sheet tells you which provider it will contact). If the key is rejected you’ll see an inline error and can’t save it. If the provider can’t be reached, you get a warning and a Save anyway option so a network blip doesn’t block you.

For providers that support it (Anthropic/Claude today), the add-account sheet shows a Sign in with Anthropic button as an alternative to pasting a key.

Mobile / desktop: tap it to complete the provider’s sign-in flow. On success the account is saved automatically and syncs to your other devices. If sign-in doesn’t complete, nothing is saved — you can retry or fall back to pasting a key.
Web: browser sign-in isn’t available. Run the sign-in from the mobile app or the Consortium CLI (consortium connect claude); the account syncs to every device automatically.

Consortium refreshes signed-in accounts for you as their tokens expire.

Multiple accounts per provider

When a provider has more than one account, the provider row shows the account count, and the provider’s detail screen shows one card per account. From a card you can:

Rename the account.
Set as default — the account used when nothing more specific applies.
Replace key (API-key accounts).
Delete — removes it from all your devices (and from Consortium servers if it was stored for cloud use).

Per-machine bindings

Under Machine bindings you can pin a specific account to a specific machine for that provider. A machine with no binding falls back to the provider default.

Failover

With two or more accounts you can turn on Automatic failover and set an order. When the active account is rate-limited or its credential is rejected, sessions fall back to the next account in the list. Accounts that are currently rate-limited (Cooling down) or Invalid are shown dimmed and skipped.

How an account is chosen for a session

Precedence, highest first:

A per-session pick (the account chip in the model picker, when a provider has more than one account).
The machine’s binding for that provider.
The provider default.
The most recently updated account.

Device-only vs. stored with Consortium

Every account has a Store with Consortium for cloud agents toggle. It controls custody — where the credential can be used from:

Device-only (default, toggle OFF): the credential is end-to-end encrypted and syncs only between your devices. Consortium’s servers cannot read it. Your local machines’ agents use it; cloud agents cannot.
Stored with Consortium (toggle ON): a copy is escrowed on Consortium servers so cloud agents can run on your account. Credentials stored this way are readable by Consortium servers — this is required for server-side cloud dispatch. The app shows this disclosure whenever you enable it.

Turning the toggle off deletes the server-side copy; cloud agents can no longer use the account, and your devices keep it. Deleting an account removes both the device copies and any stored copy.

Enable an account for cloud sessions

Cloud sessions run on Consortium’s servers, so they can only use accounts that are stored with Consortium.

In the cloud model picker, accounts already stored with Consortium are labelled as running with your own account on Consortium servers.
A device-only account shows an Enable for cloud action that opens the custody disclosure above before storing a copy.

When a cloud session runs on your own account, Consortium meters usage for your records but does not charge managed-inference credits for it — you pay your provider directly.