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Your Mac Studio’s unified memory can hold models a laptop can’t, which is why it ends up running LM Studio or Ollama as a headless inference box. The part that isn’t solved for you is reaching that model from anywhere other than the Mac Studio itself. Run the Tokios connector next to LM Studio or Ollama and you get one authenticated endpoint at https://api.tokios.com — no binding the server to 0.0.0.0, no VPN, no per-teammate network setup.

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LAN is not the same as your team

LM Studio’s own docs cover serve on local network — binding the server beyond 127.0.0.1 so other devices on your Wi-Fi can reach it — with a warning attached, and its request-level auth is off by default. That gets a second machine on your home network talking to the Mac Studio. It doesn’t get you:
  • A teammate who isn’t on your LAN. Someone working from another building, another city, or their own home network can’t reach a server bound to your local subnet.
  • Per-person access control. LM Studio’s network server has no built-in API key, so anyone who can reach the bound port and path can call it — there’s no way to hand one teammate access and not another, or to cut someone off later without restarting the server.
  • One address that survives you changing machines. A LAN IP is tied to your network. Move the Mac Studio, change routers, or hand the job to a Mac mini instead, and every client’s config breaks.
Tokios doesn’t change how LM Studio or Ollama runs — it adds a connector that dials out from the Mac Studio to https://api.tokios.com, so you never bind the runtime past loopback and never open an inbound port.

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Set it up on your Mac Studio

1

Start your runtime on the Mac Studio

Run the model server as you normally would, on loopback.
Confirm it answers on its own OpenAI-compatible /v1 API before adding the connector.
2

Get a claim code and pair the connector

In the dashboard, open the Setup tab and select Start pairing to get a one-time claim code shaped TKS-XXXX-XXXX (valid about 15 minutes). On the Mac Studio, run:
Tokios ships a native Apple Silicon (arm64) build of tokios-connector, which covers Mac Studio, Mac mini, and MacBook Pro on Apple Silicon. If Gatekeeper flags the binary, clear it with xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ./tokios-connector; the install one-liner above avoids this.Back in the dashboard, approve the device on the Setup or Connectors tab. The connector’s token is delivered over the tunnel — you never see it on screen or paste it into a file.
3

Point the connector at your runtime's /v1 endpoint

The connector’s upstream is LM Studio or Ollama’s own OpenAI-compatible API on the Mac Studio, still on loopback — not a port you expose to the network. Default ports: LM Studio 1234, Ollama 11434 (both with /v1 appended). No inbound firewall rule, no LAN binding, and no AllowLan setting needed for this single-machine path.
4

Register a deployment

On the Models tab, map your upstream model id (for example, the LM Studio or Ollama model you loaded) to a public deployment name such as studio-model. Clients send this deployment name in the model field, not the upstream id.
5

Create an API key

On the Keys tab, create a key. Keys are sk-tok-… Bearer tokens, shown once, and can be scoped to specific deployment name patterns — so a teammate’s key can be limited to just this deployment.

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Keep it always on

A terminal window works for testing, but a Mac Studio doing this job full time should keep the connector running across reboots and logouts. Run it as a launchd background service using a ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.tokios.connector.plist agent that points ProgramArguments at tokios-connector --config and your tokios-connector.json, with RunAtLoad and KeepAlive set so it restarts automatically. See Connector config: running as a background service for the full plist and launchctl load / launchctl start commands. For a machine no one ever logs into interactively, consider a LaunchDaemon instead of a LaunchAgent — check Apple’s current guidance for your macOS version to confirm which is preferable for your setup.

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Use it from anywhere

Once the connector is paired and a deployment is registered, point your client at Tokios instead of the Mac Studio’s IP address or hostname.
Claude Code’s model picker only lists claude* ids, so your Tokios deployment won’t appear in the list — pass --model studio-model explicitly.
If you run more than one model on the Mac Studio — say LM Studio for one model and Ollama for another — use the connector config file to define multiple routes and upstreams instead of the single-model pairing flow. See Model routing for registering and switching between several deployments behind the same endpoint.

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Why one endpoint

  • Share the Mac Studio without sharing your network. A teammate calls https://api.tokios.com with their own scoped key — they never need to be on your LAN or Tailscale tailnet.
  • Swap models without touching client config. Point studio-model at a different upstream model or backend, and every agent and script that already targets it keeps working.
  • No inbound ports, no 0.0.0.0. LM Studio and Ollama stay on 127.0.0.1. The connector only makes outbound connections to Tokios.

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Next steps

Quickstart

Go from zero to a working connector, deployment, and API key.

Install the connector

Full connector install and pairing reference for all platforms.

Use Claude Code

Configure ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL and ANTHROPIC_API_KEY in detail.

Connector config reference

Serve multiple models from one Mac with tokios-connector.json, and run it as a launchd service.