Getting Started with Claude Desktop

How it works

AI Reserve supports keyless access for Claude Desktop. Instead of an API key, Claude Desktop is pointed at the AI Reserve gateway with a small settings file, and each person signs in with their work Google account the first time they use it. From then on:

For enterprise admins — rolling it out

If you hold the enterprise admin role in the AI Reserve portal, you manage your organization's users, see per-user usage, and control spend — all Claude Desktop traffic bills to your organization's AI Reserve wallet. A rollout has four parts: add your users, distribute the settings file, watch usage, and offboard people when they leave.

Adding users

Access is controlled entirely by the portal's user list. Adding a user is the permission — the moment a user record exists for someone's work Google account, their Claude Desktop sign-in works. There is no separate invitation email they must accept and no per-user key to hand out.

Add users from your organization's user management area in the AI Reserve portal using their work Google email address. Anyone not on the list can still complete the Google sign-in screen, but the gateway will refuse their requests with an access error.

Distributing the settings file

Claude Desktop learns where the AI Reserve gateway lives from a small, static settings file. It contains no secrets — just the gateway URL and sign-in configuration (see Configuration values) — so it is safe to email, drop in a shared drive, or push over MDM.

Ready-made files are on the portal's Connect page:

For a handful of users, just send them the link to the Connect page along with the user setup steps below — each file installs with a couple of clicks. For a fleet, push it centrally:

MDM fleet deployment

The same settings can be deployed org-wide through your device management tooling, so users only have to install Claude Desktop and sign in:

• macOS (Jamf, Kandji, Mosyle, Intune, …). Upload and scope the same .mobileconfig profile from the Connect page. It sets managed preferences in Claude Desktop's preference domain com.anthropic.claudefordesktop.
• Windows (Intune, Group Policy, …). Deploy the values from the .reg file to HKCU\SOFTWARE\Policies\Claude for per-user policy, or the equivalent keys under HKLM for machine-wide policy.

The exact keys and values are listed under Configuration values if you prefer to author the profile or policy in your own tooling.

Monitoring usage & spend

Claude Desktop traffic appears in the portal alongside API-key usage. As an enterprise admin you can see per-user usage for everyone in your organization; all of it draws from the organization's AI Reserve wallet, so budgets and spend reporting work exactly as they do for the rest of your gateway traffic.

Offboarding

To remove someone's access, deactivate the user in the portal. Their Claude Desktop access ends within about 10 minutes — the short delay is the gateway's token cache draining. There are no keys to revoke and nothing to uninstall from their machine.

For users — setup in 3 steps

You need your work Google account and about five minutes. If anything fails, see Troubleshooting below.

1. Install Claude Desktop

Download Claude Desktop from claude.com/download and install it. You need version 1.6889.0 or later — if you installed it a while ago, update it first (the version is shown in the app's About screen).

2. Install the AI Reserve settings file

Go to the portal's Connect page and download the file for your platform. It contains no secrets — it just tells Claude Desktop to use the AI Reserve gateway and to sign you in with Google.

macOS

1. Download aireserve-claude-desktop.mobileconfig.
2. Open the downloaded file (double-click it). macOS will note that a profile was downloaded.
3. Open System Settings → General → Device Management, select the AI Reserve profile, and click Install.

Windows

1. Download aireserve-claude-desktop.reg.
2. Double-click the file and confirm the prompt to add it to the registry.

3. Sign in with your work Google account

Launch Claude Desktop (restart it if it was already running). Instead of asking for a Claude.ai account, the welcome screen offers organization sign-in:

Click Sign in with your organization. Your browser opens — choose your work Google account, not a personal one, and authorize the app:

That's it: no API key, nothing else to configure. Your name appears in the bottom-left corner of the app with a “Gateway” badge, and everything you use is billed to your organization automatically:

Troubleshooting

Configuration values

These are the exact values the Connect page files install. They contain no secrets — the OAuth client is public by design, and access is enforced server-side by the portal's user list — so they're safe to publish and to bake into MDM profiles.

The inferenceGatewayOidc value:

{
  "issuer": "https://aireserve.us.auth0.com/",
  "clientId": "KlmloS0fBazToICUBkT1Pn2D0UL18rI5",
  "redirectPort": 53180
}

The sign-in flow uses a local redirect on port 53180, so the browser must be able to reach localhost:53180 during sign-in (this is standard for desktop OIDC sign-ins and needs no inbound firewall rule).

Building API integrations too? The full gateway documentation — SDKs, wire formats, and the Code CLI — lives in the developer documentation.