Short Lived Restrictive API Keys
OpenAI Developer Community
March 12, 2026
Hey there, Good day!
I am building an app that will need to access your services on the client. However, I would rather not leak my API keys there.
Besides deploying this part of the infra to the edge. I was thinking that it would be great to expose short-lived restricted api keys to the client.
Do you have such functionality, or do I need to implement it by hand?
Example: Api key for a specific response session with an expiration of 1 hour and only specific model access (only gpt 5 mini) and a specific user (via IP or GEO location) optional.
The client would then make requests directly to the OpenAI API (saving bandwidth).
Using the new WebSocket response API I believe this would be even better for load times and speed
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