1Password service accounts, SDKs and Environments MCP vs Phase

1Password service accounts, SDKs and Environments MCP

Service accounts scoped per vault to read, write or share, with an optional expiry and permissions that can't be changed after creation. Teams, Families and Individual get 1,000 service account reads an hour per token, and the 429 carries no Retry-After.

Phase

Service account tokens can be minted with an expiry over the API, every secret read is logged, and the CLI redacts values when it detects an AI agent. No OpenAPI document or pagination was found in the reviewed documentation, and the Free plan keeps audit logs for 24 hours.

1Password service accounts, SDKs and Environments MCP

1. Read secrets by reference (op://vault/item/field) with client.secrets.resolve or resolveAll, and keep the reference, not the value, in config
2. On Teams or personal plans budget for 1,000 reads an hour per token and cache resolved values for the run; a 429 means wait for the hourly window, there's no Retry-After
3. Create the service account with only read_items on one vault and --expires-in set to the job length, since permissions can't be narrowed later
4. Set integrationName and integrationVersion in createClient so the usage report shows which agent read what
5. Don't ask the Environments MCP server for a value. Use it to find the variable name, then load it with op run or the SDK

Phase

1. Enable server-side encryption on the app before calling /v1/secrets. Without it the REST API cannot read or write that app's secrets
2. Send Authorization: Bearer ServiceAccount <token> for a service account and Bearer User <token> for a personal access token. The token type is part of the header
3. Stay under 120 requests a minute per account on Free and 240 on Pro, and wait the seconds in the retry-after header on a 429
4. Treat a 409 on POST /v1/secrets as the key already existing at that path, and use PUT to change it. Rotating secrets reject PUT and DELETE
5. Have a person run phase ai enable and choose masked values. The CLI blocks an agent from running phase ai enable or phase ai disable itself