alphaXiv
by alphaXiv
Search, read and analyse arXiv papers from an AI agent, plus researcher profiles and a saved library. alphaXiv documents 18 tools, eight of which write or delete — not the six read tools Anthropic's directory lists.
Verified connector
Listed by Anthropic as a partner connector in its Connectors Directory.
Connection checked by Agentman on .
Anthropic states this reflects the level of review a connector received, not a security audit.
Connect alphaXiv via MCP
https://api.alphaxiv.org/mcp/v1Works in any MCP-compatible client. In Agentman Studio it is one click — no config file to edit.
alphaXiv Tools & Capabilities (6)
Tool names from Anthropic's directory listing. This server requires sign-in, so we could not read tool descriptions or parameter schemas.
Frequently asked questions
Can the alphaXiv connector read any GitHub repository, or only a paper's own code?
Any public repository. The tool takes a githubUrl parameter described as the paper's codebase, but nothing in the documented contract restricts it to a repo linked from a paper, and alphaXiv's own three examples all point at openai/gpt-2 rather than at a paper. Passing a path of / returns the whole file tree plus every top-level file. Treat it as a general public-code reader.
Can the alphaXiv connector reach my private GitHub repositories?
No, and nothing in the connection gives it a route to try. You never grant alphaXiv a GitHub identity — the only OAuth scopes its server advertises are email and profile, both of which describe your alphaXiv account. With no GitHub credential in the exchange, the tool can only fetch what an anonymous request to github.com can already fetch, which is public repositories.
Is the alphaXiv MCP server actually read-only, as the directory says?
No. Anthropic's directory records the permission as Read, and all six tool names it lists do read. alphaXiv's own documentation describes eighteen tools and labels four of them Writes and four more Destructive, including delete_folder and unfollow_researcher. The writes are confined to your alphaXiv account — your library folders and your followed-researcher list — and no tool edits a paper.
Why does a connector over public arXiv papers need me to sign in?
Because the account is what alphaXiv meters and personalises against, not what unlocks the papers. arXiv content is openly available. The server's own protected-resource descriptor asks for email and profile only, which identify you rather than grant data access. Its research tools call alphaXiv's own AI models and, per its documentation, count against your assistant quota, and its library and follow tools need somewhere to write.
How many papers does the alphaXiv connector cover, and does it reach past arXiv?
alphaXiv describes its corpus as the millions of papers in arXiv and does not publish a precise figure. It is not strictly limited to arXiv at read time: answer_pdf_queries accepts Semantic Scholar abstract pages and direct PDF URLs from any host, so an agent can point it at a paper arXiv never held. Discovery, though, ranks over the arXiv corpus.
Does using the alphaXiv connector send paper content to a third-party AI model?
Yes, most likely. alphaXiv's privacy policy states that assistant features may share prompts, selected paper text and uploads with third-party AI and model-routing providers, and names Google Gemini, Vertex AI, Cohere, OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, DeepSeek and others among them. It says it does not authorise those providers to train general models on the inputs. Its research tools are described as calling alphaXiv's models.
Can I add the alphaXiv MCP server inside claude.ai or chatgpt.com?
Not directly. alphaXiv states that browser-hosted MCP integrations are unsupported because CORS is locked to first-party origins, and we observed that lock live — the endpoint returns an access-control-allow-origin of www.alphaxiv.org only. Native clients such as Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code and Zed work as normal, and a local mcp-remote bridge is the documented workaround.
May I republish the paper text the alphaXiv connector returns?
Not on alphaXiv's terms alone, and possibly not on the paper's either. alphaXiv's Terms of Service restrict the Service to personal use and forbid distributing, reproducing or creating derivative works from Service Content for commercial purposes. Separately, arXiv papers carry per-paper author-chosen licences, many of which are not Creative Commons. Check the individual paper before reusing its text.
Sources
- alphaXiv MCP Server documentation — https://www.alphaxiv.org/docs/mcp (fetched 2026-08-19, HTTP 200, no redirect) · retrieved 2026-08-19
- alphaXiv Terms of Service, last revised 2026-04-17 — https://www.alphaxiv.org/terms (fetched 2026-08-19) · retrieved 2026-04-17
- alphaXiv Privacy Policy, last revised 2026-06-30 — https://www.alphaxiv.org/privacy (fetched 2026-08-19) · retrieved 2026-06-30
- Live unauthenticated probe of
https://api.alphaxiv.org/mcp/v1— HTTP 401 withWWW-Authenticate: Bearer realm="mcp", 2026-08-19 · retrieved 2026-08-19 - alphaXiv RFC 9728 protected-resource descriptor — https://api.alphaxiv.org/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource/mcp/v1 (fetched 2026-08-19) · retrieved 2026-08-19
- alphaXiv RFC 8414 authorization-server metadata — https://api.alphaxiv.org/auth/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server (fetched 2026-08-19) · retrieved 2026-08-19
- Anthropic Connectors Directory entry — https://claude.ai/directory/fa0fb2e1-c3ba-4486-b576-0881432c5a4e (snapshot 2026-08-16) · retrieved 2026-08-16
- alphaXiv
robots.txt— https://www.alphaxiv.org/robots.txt (fetched 2026-08-19;Allow: /, noContent-Signal) · retrieved 2026-08-19
Use in Agentman
Connect once and your agents call these tools on their own — on a schedule, in a workflow, with nobody at the keyboard.
Open in Agentman StudioServer Info
- Category
- Data & Research
- Developer
- alphaXiv
- Tools
- 6
- Domain
- api.alphaxiv.org
Using Claude Desktop or another MCP client? Setup docs — the connection URL above works anywhere.