Creating and revoking a connection key

A connection key is a long password that identifies one assistant as you. You create it, copy it once, and paste it into whatever you are connecting.

Creating one

1. Open the menu under your name, top right, and choose Profile.
2. Find AI connections and choose Create a connection.
3. Give it a name that says what it is for — Claude on my laptop, not key 1. You will be reading this name later in the activity record, deciding whether to revoke it.
4. Decide the two switches, below.
5. Optionally shorten the expiry. Every key expires; you can bring the date forward but not remove it.
6. Copy the key. It is shown once.

The key is not stored anywhere it can be read back — not by you, not by us. If you lose it, nobody can recover it; you revoke it and create another. Treat it exactly like a password: it is one.

The two switches

Let it make changes

Without this, the connection can read your courses and cannot alter them. A read-only key is a genuinely useful thing — it answers questions about your courses and cannot touch them — and it is the right starting point if you are trying this out.

Let it work on courses that have students

Without this, a connection can build and change courses nobody is enrolled on, and is refused on courses that have students. With it, it may work on live courses too.

Lessons that students have already read stay locked either way. This switch is about courses that have people enrolled on them; the frozen-lesson rule is separate and cannot be switched off.

Reading is always allowed and is not offered as a switch, because a connection that cannot read cannot do anything at all.

Expiry

Every key expires. Unless you choose otherwise it lasts 90 days, and the longest any key can last is a year. You can shorten that when you create it; you cannot turn it off.

This is deliberate. A key that never expires is a key nobody ever revisits — it outlives the job it was made for, the laptop it was pasted into and sometimes the person who made it. A date forces the question to come round again.

Shorten it for anything you know is temporary: a contractor, an experiment, a one-off translation job. When a key expires it simply stops working, with no action needed from you, and anything using it is told the key has expired rather than that it is wrong.

Revoking one

On the same screen, Revoke. It takes effect immediately: anything using that key stops working on its very next request. There is no grace period and no undo.

Revoke a key when:

• The work it was for is finished.
• You see something in the activity record you did not ask for.
• You are not sure where the key has been. Uncertainty is sufficient reason — a new one takes a minute.
• We tell you it has been failing repeatedly, which usually means something still holds an old copy of it.

How many to create

One per thing you are connecting, named for that thing. The point is not security theatre — it is that the activity record then tells you which assistant did what, and you can revoke one without stopping the others.

Creating more keys does not give you more capacity. The limits on how much work can be done are shared across the whole site, not counted per key, so splitting a job across several keys achieves nothing except making the record harder to read.