Connecting and Login

Chat apps with a connectors/apps menu

Most hosted chat assistants that support remote MCP servers work the same way:

• Open your assistant's Settings and find Connectors or Apps (sometimes behind a developer-mode toggle).
• Choose Add and enter the server address: https://mcp.ipauthor.com/mcp. For the login type, choose OAuth.
• Sign in with your work email and the one-time code we send, then approve access.
• In a new chat, turn on the IP Author connector and ask a patent question.

On a Team or Enterprise plan, adding a new connector for the whole company is usually restricted to owners or admins. If you don't see an Add option, ask your admin to add it once. After that it appears in your own connectors list for you to sign into individually.

Command-line tools

Most command line tools that speak MCP take a remote server address and a name. Point yours at https://mcp.ipauthor.com/mcp and either sign in with OAuth when prompted, or pass your access token directly:

--header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN"

Check your specific tool's own documentation for the exact command to add a remote MCP server.

Clients set up by JSON

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ipauthor": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://mcp.ipauthor.com/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer ${IPAUTHOR_TOKEN}" }
    }
  }
}

Restart the client afterward, and the IP Author tools will appear in its tool list. Tools that support OAuth for remote servers can leave out the header and sign in instead.

Setting this up for your whole company

If you are an admin on a Team or Enterprise plan, you can turn this on for everyone at once instead of asking each person to sign in one by one.

• Add the connector once from your admin settings, using the same address above.
• Everyone on your plan can then sign in individually with their own work email and one-time code. Each person's activity and access stays separate. One person can never see or use another person's uploaded documents.
• You can also allow only email addresses from your company's own domain to sign in.

The technical details, for your IT or security team

• Login uses OAuth, an open standard for signing in without sharing your password with us, plus one-time codes sent to your email. If your tool needs a fixed key instead, you can use a personal access token.
• Every request goes over one connection type, called Streamable HTTP, which is the standard way MCP servers and MCP clients talk to each other.
• We allow up to 300 requests per minute for each signed-in user.
• Each customer's documents and data are kept separate by account.
• Every request is logged with who made it, what tool was called, and when, so any issue can be traced.

Your first 15 minutes

1. A question you can check yourself: "How many patent families does [a company you know] hold in [a technology you know]? Break it down by year and top classifications."
2. One document, deep: "Pull the full prosecution history for [a patent you know] and summarize each office action and how the applicant overcame it."
3. One heavy job: "Build a competitive landscape for [your space]." Usually takes a few minutes, longer for a very broad topic, and returns a link to an interactive report.

Then move on to the example prompts.