Definition
Access token is an access token is a temporary digital pass a service gives you after you sign in or pay, which your software shows with each request to prove it is allowed in, without sending your password again.
An access token is a string of characters that works like a wristband at a venue. You prove who you are once, at the door. After that, you show the wristband to get into each area, and nobody asks for your ID again.
On the web, the "door" is a sign-in, a payment or an app authorization. The service then hands your software an access token. Each later request carries the token, and the service checks it to decide whether to answer.
Do not confuse it with a token in AI, which is a chunk of text a model reads and writes. The two share a name and nothing else.
Tokens usually expire after minutes or hours, which limits the damage if one leaks. Many systems pair a short-lived access token with a longer-lived refresh token that can request a new one.
An API key is typically a long-lived secret tied to your account. An access token is typically short-lived and often narrower, limited to certain actions or data. Both are secrets: anyone who holds one can act with its permissions.
An AI agent that browses or calls services usually does so with tokens. That raises two practical points.
What the agent holds, it can use. If you give an agent a token with broad permissions, it can do anything that token allows. Give each agent the narrowest token that does the job, and set expiry.
Tokens can be found where they should not be. A gate that depends on a token is only as strong as how the token is handed out. If a public page gives tokens to any visitor, then anyone, including a goal-driven agent, can obtain one and walk through. Limits that matter belong in code and permissions, not only in an instruction to the model.
Tokens are one piece of AI guardrails, alongside rate limiting and sandboxes, that control what software may do on your behalf.
An access token is a temporary credential a service issues after sign-in or payment, which software presents with each request to prove it is authorized.
No. An API key is usually a long-lived account secret, while an access token is usually short-lived and limited in scope, though both must be kept secret.
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