# Lobster for AI assistants

> Connect Lobster to Claude and other AI assistants. Search stakeholders, plan advocacy and record actions by asking, using your own Lobster sign-in.

- URL: https://lobster.ist/mcp/
- Language: English
- Also in Finnish: https://lobster.ist/fi/mcp/

Connect Lobster to Claude — or any other AI assistant that supports MCP — and work with your stakeholder data by asking for it. Find out who you have met about a policy file, draft the next round of meetings, record what was agreed, and pull a Transparency Register summary, all in the assistant you already use.

The assistant works **as you**: it sees exactly the data your own Lobster account sees, and anything it records is attributed to you.

## Before you start

- **Your organisation's Lobster needs the connector switched on.** It is enabled per organisation, not automatically. If it is not on yet, ask your Lobster administrator or email [support@lobster.ist](mailto:support@lobster.ist).
- **You need your usual Lobster sign-in** — Google, Microsoft Entra, or email and password with two-factor authentication. Whatever you use to sign in today is what you will use here.
- **You do not need to know your Lobster address.** You never type your instance hostname, and there is nothing to install.

## Connect it to Claude

1. In Claude, open **Settings → Connectors** and add a connector.
2. Use this URL:

   ```
   https://mcp.lobster.ist/mcp
   ```

3. Claude opens a Lobster page that asks for **your work email**. This is only used to send you to your own organisation's Lobster sign-in — it is not a login, and the page never sees your password.
4. Sign in to Lobster the way you always do.
5. Approve the connection. You are done; the assistant now has access until you disconnect it.

The next time you connect, the email step remembers your organisation and gets out of the way.

## Other AI assistants

Any client that supports remote MCP servers over OAuth can connect to the same URL — `https://mcp.lobster.ist/mcp`. The endpoint speaks Streamable HTTP and OAuth 2.1 with PKCE, and registers clients automatically, so there is no key to copy and no configuration file to edit beyond the URL.

## What you can ask for

**Find and read**

- Who a stakeholder is, which organisation they belong to, and how you are connected to them
- Everything recorded on a project, theme or action, and the timeline behind it
- Open consultations, and the policy files a theme touches
- A summary report, or a briefing pack before a meeting

**Plan and record**

- Create projects under a theme, and actions under a project
- Log a meeting, an event or a call, with who attended and what was agreed
- Add stakeholders and organisations, connect them, tag them, and keep notes on them
- Write updates and comments

**Some things stay read-only on purpose.** Stakeholders and organisations that arrive from official registers — lobbying registers, party rolls — are master data. The assistant can read them, and local edits would be overwritten on the next sync, so it will not change them.

**Transparency Register entries need a method of contact.** For meetings and events, Finnish Transparency Register reporting requires how the contact happened. The assistant will ask rather than guess, and it should — a guessed value becomes a wrong statutory report.

## Privacy and security

- **You sign in on your own Lobster.** The connector redirects you to your organisation's own sign-in page. It never sees or stores your password.
- **Your data stays in your Lobster.** `mcp.lobster.ist` passes requests through to your organisation's own instance and keeps no copy of stakeholder, project or action data.
- **Nothing you ask or receive is logged.** The contents of your requests and the answers that come back are deliberately never written to a log, because they are personal data about the people you work with.
- **Access is per person, not per organisation.** Your connection carries your own permissions. Someone who cannot edit a project in Lobster cannot edit it through an assistant either.
- **The access key is encrypted** and is only ever sent to your own organisation's Lobster.

Our [privacy policy](https://lobster.ist/lobster-privacy-policy/) and [terms of service](https://lobster.ist/terms-of-service/) apply here as everywhere else.

## Disconnecting

Two ways, and either is enough:

- **In your assistant**, remove the Lobster connector. The matching access in Lobster is revoked at the same time.
- **In Lobster**, open your API keys screen and revoke the key named after the assistant — for example *Claude (mcp.lobster.ist)*. This is also how an administrator ends a connection for someone who has left.

## If something goes wrong

**"We couldn't tell which Lobster that is."** The email address did not match a known organisation. Check it is your work address at the domain your organisation uses for Lobster — a personal address will not match. If it still does not work, email [support@lobster.ist](mailto:support@lobster.ist) and we will sort it out.

**"That Lobster instance is not set up for AI connectors yet."** We found your organisation, but the connector has not been enabled for it. That is ours and your administrator's to fix, not something you can retry your way past — contact your Lobster administrator or [support@lobster.ist](mailto:support@lobster.ist).

**"This connection request isn't valid."** Nothing was shared and no connection was made. Close the page and start again from your assistant. If it keeps happening, email [support@lobster.ist](mailto:support@lobster.ist) and mention the time it happened.

**It worked yesterday and today it asks me to sign in again.** Connections end when the key is revoked, when your Lobster account changes, or after a long period of disuse. Reconnecting takes the same few steps as the first time.

## Getting help

Email [support@lobster.ist](mailto:support@lobster.ist), or start from [Support](https://lobster.ist/support/). For anything about enabling the connector for a whole organisation, your Lobster administrator can reach us the same way.