Connect AI Assistants to X02 with MCP

Connect Claude, Cursor, or any Model Context Protocol client to your X02 account. Upload, search, organize, and share files by asking — with scoped, revocable access and no API key pasted into the client.

By X02 Team · 2026-09-21 · MCP, AI, Developer Tools, API, Security

You can now let an AI assistant work on your X02 files for you — find an old upload, look at an image, add a new file, tidy things into folders, hand you a share link. You ask; it does the clicking.

It works because X02 speaks the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard AI apps use to connect to outside services. In practice that means you paste one address into Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor, sign in to X02 once in your browser, and you are done. You never copy an API key into the AI app.

Just want it working? Set Up X02 in Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and More is the step-by-step for each app. This page is the why — what an assistant can reach, what it cannot, and what happens to your credentials.

[!TIP] Quick Navigation:

• What This Actually Gets You
• Connecting a Client
• What the Assistant Can Do
• Permissions and Scopes
• How Sign-In Works
• Disconnecting an App
• Limits and Gotchas
• Next Steps & Related Tutorials

What This Actually Gets You

The REST API already lets you script X02. MCP is for the other case: when an AI assistant is doing the work and you want it to reach your account safely.

The difference that matters is the credential. An API key is all-or-nothing — handing one to a third-party app gives it everything your account can do, forever, and taking it back means rotating the key and breaking every other integration you own. MCP uses OAuth instead:

Use the API key for your own code. Use MCP for software you did not write.

Connecting a Client

The server lives at https://up.x02.me/mcp.

Claude Code

claude mcp add --transport http x02 https://up.x02.me/mcp

Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, and others

Add a remote MCP server in the client's settings and give it the same URL:

https://up.x02.me/mcp

Trying it by hand

The official MCP Inspector is useful for browsing the tools and calling them manually:

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector

Whichever client you use, it will open a browser window the first time you connect. Sign in to X02, review what the app is asking for, and approve. The client stores its own token from there.

What the Assistant Can Do

Fifteen tools, covering the things you would otherwise do in the dashboard:

In practice you do not call these by name. You ask:

"Upload this screenshot and give me the link." "Find the invoice PDF I uploaded last month." "Make a folder called Release v3 and move everything from this week into it." "Share the Screenshots folder and send me the album link."

Permissions and Scopes

Every connection is scoped. The consent screen lists exactly what the app asked for before you approve it:

These are enforced on every single call, not just at sign-in. An app that was granted files:read and later tries to delete something gets refused — the request never reaches your files.

[!NOTE] Deleting is permanent. delete_files and delete_folder are marked destructive so clients can prompt you first, but X02 has no trash can.

Note that the two are gated separately. files:delete covers delete_files; deleting a folder is part of folders:write, alongside creating and sharing them. Withholding files:delete stops an app removing your files, but it can still delete a folder if it holds folders:write — the files inside return to your root library rather than being destroyed, so nothing is lost, but the folder is gone.

How Sign-In Works

Worth understanding, because it is the part that protects you.

1. The client discovers the server's capabilities from a metadata document — no configuration beyond the URL.
2. It registers itself and sends your browser to X02 with a cryptographic challenge (PKCE).
3. You sign in on x02.me, not in the app, and see what is being requested.
4. On approval, X02 issues an access token bound to that one app and those scopes. It lasts an hour, alongside a refresh token the client rotates to stay connected for up to thirty days without asking you again.

Two details that matter:

The consent screen shows where you will be sent back to. Any developer can register a client and name it anything — "X02 Official" included. The name is self-declared; the redirect destination is not. If that host is not the app you just clicked in, deny it.

Your API key never leaves X02. The server resolves your account from the app's token internally. The app cannot read your key, and a leaked token cannot be turned into one.

Disconnecting an App

Revoking is per app, and this is the part worth reading properly.

Remove the connector in your client and it discards the tokens it holds. Well-behaved clients also call X02's revocation endpoint on the way out, which kills those tokens on our side at the same moment. Not every client does, and there is no way for us to tell from the outside which one you are using.

So, to be precise about what you are guaranteed:

• Your API key, your folder keys and every other connected app are unaffected. That part is absolute — this is the whole reason to prefer MCP over handing out a key.
• If the client revokes on disconnect, access ends immediately.
• If it does not, the access token it already holds keeps working until it expires — at most an hour — and its refresh token would remain valid for thirty days.

[!NOTE] X02 does not yet have a page listing your connected apps, so revocation is currently driven by the client rather than by you. If you need a connection dead now and are not certain your client revoked it, email [email protected] or ask in our Discord and we will revoke the grant server-side. A connected-apps screen is on the roadmap, and this section will be the first thing to change when it lands.

Limits and Gotchas

Sending a file you have attached to the chat. The assistant can look at an attachment but cannot hand the bytes to X02 — there is no mechanism in the protocol for it, and no AI client exposes your attachments as public links (which is just as well). So instead:

Ask it to upload something, and it gives you a link like x02.me/drop/K7M2QXR4. Open it, press Ctrl+V if the file is already on your clipboard, and the assistant picks it up and carries on — you never have to go back and tell it you are done. Drop links stay open for fifteen minutes; if you wander off and come back to an expired one, just ask for another.

Better still, pin x02.me/drop as a tab. Anything you paste in there waits in your tray for twenty-four hours, so if you drop the screenshot before you ask, there is no link and no waiting at all.

upload_file still exists for genuinely small content — icons, SVGs, short text files. It is comfortable under 128 KB and refuses outright above 1 MB, which a single screenshot already exceeds once base64 has inflated it by a third. When it refuses, it suggests the two routes that do work: upload it yourself on x02.me and tell the assistant what it was called — X02 keeps your original name alongside the short one and list_files searches both — or hand over a URL. Ask for a drop link and it will give you one of those too.

upload_from_url is the fastest route for anything already online: give the assistant the URL and the bytes never touch the chat. It rehosts images only — the URL has to answer with an image/* content type, so a PDF or a video link is refused. Private and internal hostnames are refused as well.

The stored filename is not your filename. X02 assigns a short name on upload. Assistants are told to use the returned filename for anything afterwards, but if you are cross-referencing by hand, check list_files rather than assuming.

Uploads count against your normal quota. MCP is not a separate allowance — same daily limits, same plan file-size ceilings. Ask for get_account if you are about to run a big batch.

Uploads land in your default folder. If you have set one, that is where assistant uploads go too. See setting a default upload folder.

Next Steps & Related Tutorials

Read this article on X02