Craft Update - More Flexible Assistant, Bring Your Own Key, MCP v2, and Performance Improvements

This release is all about making Craft Assistant more flexible, more personal, and entirely on your terms.

You can now bring your own OpenAI or Anthropic credentials, customize how the Assistant responds with your own preferences and context, and take advantage of our biggest MCP update yet. We’ve also significantly improved support for Apple’s on-device Foundation Models, giving everyone access to private, offline AI at no extra cost.

Beyond AI, we’re continuing our work on improving Craft’s foundations. This update brings better performance, smoother editing, a more capable web experience, and a more stable Windows app.

And if you’ll be in San Francisco next week, don’t forget to register for our very first Craft community meetup on June 10th. We’d love to meet you there.

Our Stance on AI

AI is here to stay, but whether you use it in Craft should always be your choice.

We don’t believe AI should be forced into workflows, bundled into higher subscription prices, or required to access core functionality.

Our principles are simple:

Craft should work beautifully with or without AI.
Users should have flexibility through MCP, Bring Your Own Key, and on-device models.
Privacy, transparency, and user control come first.
We believe on-device AI will play an increasingly important role because it is private, secure, available offline, and free to use.

With MCP v2, Bring Your Own Key support, and Assistant preferences now available to everyone free of charge, we’re completing the first phase of our Assistant improvements. Our focus will now shift toward refining and improving other core areas of Craft.

Apple Foundation Models Improvements

Apple Foundation Models are available across our native apps and remain completely free for everyone. Everything runs directly on your device, meaning your data stays private, works offline, and doesn’t consume any AI credits.

We’ve also significantly improved the experience, adding support for longer conversations so interactions feel much more natural and useful for ongoing work.

Bring Your Own Key (BYOK)

You can now bring your existing credentials and use Craft Assistant without using your Craft usage quota:

OpenAI: Sign in with ChatGPT (OAuth) or paste an OpenAI API key
Anthropic: Paste an Anthropic API key
Local models: Run on-device, no quota spent anyway
Craft AI Usage: Default, unchanged

The provider menu in the chat title and in Settings → Assistant → “AI Provider Connections” lets you connect even without a subscription.

Personalize Craft Assistant

You can also add your own preferences for the Assistant (under Settings → Assistant) to get more personalized responses.

MCP v2

We’ve just released our biggest MCP update to date, enabling external agents like Claude and ChatGPT to access the following functionalities:

📂 Folder icons and colors

🎨 Document styling: backdrop, Unsplash cover images, washi tapes and more

🔗 Understanding of various kinds of Craft doc links pasted to the chat

🔎 Unified search that reduces the number of steps required to find the right content

By rethinking the interface rather than simply adding features, we’ve reduced the MCP interface token count by 85.9%, resulting in lower token usage and faster responses when working with documents and tasks.

How to update

Newly created connectors use MCP v2 automatically.
For existing connectors, a client-side disconnect-reconnect is needed to switch to v2 - as seen on the Claude example below.
Legacy MCP connections will also keep working indefinitely, but apart from critical fixes, all future MCP updates will focus on v2.

Faster, smoother, and more reliable Web and Windows

Over the past few months we’ve been investing heavily in the foundations of Craft, across all platforms, including Web and Windows. This work isn’t always visible, but it helps make Craft feel faster, smoother, and more dependable every day.

This release includes:

Better scrolling performance across collections, tables, galleries, and kanban boards
Faster and more responsive editing, especially in larger documents
Improved stability and reliability on Windows
Multi-select actions in Browse, making it easier to organize documents and folders
Better task management interactions and drag-and-drop behavior
Numerous fixes across sharing, browsing, collections, comments, and settings

We’re continuing this work throughout the rest of the year as part of our broader focus on quality and reliability.

Meet the Craft team in San Francisco

We are planning to have our first ever community meetup in San Francisco on June 10th, where you can meet with some of the team members, hear about our plans for the rest of 2026, meet members of the Craft team, and connect with other Craft users.

We’ll be happy to see you!

If you want to join, please register here!