Connect your AI agent to VLM Run’s remote MCP server and start building agentic workflows with visual AI in minutes.

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Installation

Get your API key

Head over to the VLM Run Dashboard to get your API key ($VLMRUN_API_KEY). We’ll use this to authenticate your requests to the MCP server next.

Ping the MCP server to test

The MCP server is available at the following endpoint:
https://mcp.vlm.run/mcp/sse
Authentication is handled via Bearer token in the Authorization header. The server URL no longer includes the API key directly.

Add the server to your MCP client

Add this configuration to your Claude Desktop MCP settings:
  • Location (Mac) ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
  • Location (Windows) %APPDATA%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json See docs for more details.
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "vlm-run-mcp": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "mcp-remote",
        "https://mcp.vlm.run/mcp/sse",
        "--transport",
        "sse-only",
        "--header",
        "Authorization:Bearer ${VLMRUN_API_KEY}"
      ],
      "env": {
        "VLMRUN_API_KEY": "<your-vlmrun-api-key>"
      }
    }
  }
}
Restart Claude Desktop after adding the configuration.

Test the connection

Ask your AI agent to list available tools
List available VLM Run tools
Expected response: A list of available tools like put_image_url, put_document_url, detect_faces, etc.

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Try your VLM Run MCP tool interaction

Let’s extract details from an invoice image using VLM Run MCP tools: 
Extract invoice data from this image (https://storage.googleapis.com/vlm-data-public-prod/hub/examples/document.invoice/invoice_1.jpg) using the document.invoice domain
Claude will automatically use the VLM Run MCP server to process your image and return structured JSON data.

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Troubleshooting

Need help? Join our Discord channel or contact our support team to get help.