[FEATURE] Native UI to switch Claude Desktop between 1P and 3P/Gateway inference modes
Preflight Checklist
- [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
- [x] This is a single feature request (not multiple features)
Problem Statement
Claude Desktop supports both first-party (1P, Anthropic direct) and third-party (3P, Bedrock/Vertex/Foundry/Gateway) inference modes. However, switching between them currently feels asymmetric and difficult to discover.
Switching to 3P has a documented path:
- Help → Troubleshooting → Enable Developer Mode
- Developer → Configure third-party inference
- Apply locally → app relaunches in 3P mode
Switching back to 1P does not appear to have an equivalent documented path:
- No UI toggle is visible
- No "restore" or "switch to 1P" command is visible in the app
- The
Cowork 3P|Gatewayindicator in the bottom-left shows the current mode, but does not provide a clickable way to change it - Users may need to manually delete local state directories such as
Claude-3pandClaude Nest-3pfrom%LOCALAPPDATA%on Windows, or from~/Library/Application Support/on macOS - Manual filesystem cleanup is difficult to discover and can risk data loss if users delete the wrong state
This makes 3P/Gateway experimentation feel like a one-way path. Users who try 3P mode, for example via ollama launch claude-desktop, GitHub Copilot Gateway, or Bedrock, may not know how to return to their normal 1P workflow without troubleshooting local application state.
Proposed Solution
Add a native, supported way to switch Claude Desktop between 1P and 3P/Gateway inference modes.
Possible approaches:
Option A: Settings menu
- Settings → Inference → Mode:
1P (Anthropic)/3P (custom) - Switching modes shows a confirmation dialog and restarts the app if needed
Option B: Developer menu
- Developer → Switch to first-party (1P) mode
- Developer → Switch to third-party (3P) mode
Option C: Sign-in screen
- When in 3P mode, the sign-in screen already offers "Start in Cowork on 3P"
- Add a parallel "Use Anthropic direct" option that cleanly restores 1P mode
The important part is that returning to 1P should be a supported in-product flow, not something users have to discover by deleting local state directories.
Alternative Solutions
Documentation-only fix:
- Document the manual cleanup steps for each platform
- This would help, but it is not ideal because manual filesystem operations are error-prone for non-technical users
CLI-only fix:
- Add a command such as
claude --restore-1p - This would help CLI users, but would still be hard to discover for Claude Desktop / Cowork users who primarily interact with the app UI
Current workaround:
- Manually delete
Claude-3pandClaude Nest-3plocal state directories - This works, but it is not discoverable from the app and can be risky if users remove the wrong data
For comparison, Ollama provides ollama launch claude-desktop --restore to handle its side of the configuration. Claude Desktop should still provide its own native UI or supported command for switching back to 1P mode.
Priority
Medium - Would be very helpful
Feature Category
Configuration and settings
Use Case Example
Example scenario:
- I normally use Claude Desktop in 1P / Anthropic direct mode.
- I run
ollama launch claude-desktopto evaluate local Ollama models. - Claude Desktop switches into 3P/Gateway mode.
- I decide the experiment is not a good fit and want to return to my normal 1P workflow.
- I search the app menu, settings, help, and documentation for a supported "switch back" option.
- I do not find a visible rollback path.
- The app continues showing
Cowork 3P|Gatewayin the bottom-left corner. - I eventually discover that I need to manually delete local state directories such as
Claude-3pandClaude Nest-3p.
With this feature, users could safely try 3P/Gateway providers and return to 1P from the app without filesystem-level recovery steps.
Additional Context
Possibly related issues:
- #52572 - Support 3P inference providers in Claude Code (CLI parity)
- #46447 - Chrome extension backend toggle
- #55946 - 3P mode rootfs.vhdx commit failures
Existing 3P mode documentation:
Community setup guides for Gateway workflows can also leave users needing a clean rollback path. This request is not specific to Ollama or any single third-party provider; it is about making Claude Desktop's inference mode state visible and reversible from the product.
10 Comments
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1ste1wo/claude_desktop_now_supports_3party_api_endpoint/
I saw this image in the link. Do you know what feature this is?
<img width="962" height="684" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/6602efe7-615f-45a7-a42f-0c8e84d69d98" />
@Moge800
Oh, I see.,When I clicked Log out in the bottom-left corner of the third-party client, this appeared. So I’m thinking this feature might already exist.
Thanks @PollionChang for digging into this! I honestly had no idea that flow existed — I'd never actually clicked Log out in 3P mode, so I never saw that screen. Good catch.
That said, I think this still leaves the original request open for a couple of reasons:
So the underlying capability may partially exist, but the request is really about surfacing it as a supported, discoverable in-product flow. Thanks again for the pointer — that's genuinely useful context for narrowing this down.
From a product logic perspective, I think the logout flow itself seems fine. The main issue is that there isn’t any documentation or guidance explaining it.
+1 on this. Adding a recent data point:
As of Claude Desktop 1.9255.2 (1dc8f7) 2026-05-27, the "Apply Locally" button in Configure third-party inference has been removed:
This makes the asymmetry described in this issue worse. There's now even fewer entry points to manage local-vs-managed inference state. A native UI to switch between 1P and 3P modes (as proposed here) would directly solve my use case: switching between different AWS Bedrock profiles for dev/prod environments without losing local config.
Screenshots attached showing the before/after.
Before
<img width="996" height="378" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/80ebb536-aaeb-44ac-8f33-fc750c35ad71" />
After
<img width="901" height="722" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/9e13e6ee-5816-40ca-9b1e-be533ba90e7b" />
This should not be treated as a feature request. This has broken the app and is a bug. The ability to revert is a MUST HAVE. Attempting to revert 1P is broken. Uninstalling doesn't resolve the feature; even deleting folders here: %USERPROFILE%\.claude\ , %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Claude\ . The app also leaves a bread crumb somewhere because reinstalling and the app complains it cannot connect and it is now an expensive chatbot.
However, I found a quick solution to restore to Claude Desktop by using this command
ollama launch claude-desktop --restoreThanks. I don't know if this would have solved the issue as I ended up just having to reinstall the OS on my laptop because I needed to get the app working for a class I was taking on Claude code. I'll give using 3P on a VM and see if this works. Appreciate the info!
as of the most recent update, even upon logout, if using a bootstrap url, you can only log back in to your bootstrap url set up, even if disable subscription sign in is set to false. please advise.
It seems like there is no way to get back to the original chats, connectors, etc. when logging out of 3P mode and switching back to 1P mode by logging in to Anthropic. Can I get confirmation if others are able to get back those original chats from the original 1P mode if they switch back to 1P from the 3P mode?