Kimi 401 Error
✅Solved
I’m new…successfully integrated the grok API, but the credit burn was too high. I’m trying to give kimi 2.5 a try, but I keep getting a 401 authentication error. I have deleted and recreated the key, make sure the key is correct in the JSON code on openclaw control, echo commands in terminal are returning the correct key, and the shows correctly in the ~/.Zshrc file…stuck and would really appreciate some help 
MacBook Air 2020 M1, OpenClaw 2026.2.13
MacBook Air 2020 M1, OpenClaw 2026.2.13Solution
Yep, that tracks.
That “400 Unspecified Role” is typically the upstream API complaining about the chat message roles it received (e.g. it doesn’t fully accept the OpenAI-style message set OpenClaw sends during tool use / system prompts). OpenRouter tends to be smoother here because it normalizes a bunch of those OpenAI-compat edge cases and the auth path is simpler.
For anyone else reading this later:
- If you’re running the Gateway as a service on macOS, don’t rely on
- If you want Kimi directly: make sure you’re on the right provider (Moonshot vs Kimi Coding) and endpoint. Docs: https://docs.openclaw.ai/providers/moonshot
- If you hit weird 400s after auth works: OpenRouter is a perfectly reasonable “it just works” workaround until direct provider compatibility improves.
If this thread is basically resolved, please mark the solution message (right-click → Apps → Mark Solution) so Answer Overflow indexes it for the next person.
That “400 Unspecified Role” is typically the upstream API complaining about the chat message roles it received (e.g. it doesn’t fully accept the OpenAI-style message set OpenClaw sends during tool use / system prompts). OpenRouter tends to be smoother here because it normalizes a bunch of those OpenAI-compat edge cases and the auth path is simpler.
For anyone else reading this later:
- If you’re running the Gateway as a service on macOS, don’t rely on
~/.zshrc~/.openclaw/.env- If you want Kimi directly: make sure you’re on the right provider (Moonshot vs Kimi Coding) and endpoint. Docs: https://docs.openclaw.ai/providers/moonshot
- If you hit weird 400s after auth works: OpenRouter is a perfectly reasonable “it just works” workaround until direct provider compatibility improves.
If this thread is basically resolved, please mark the solution message (right-click → Apps → Mark Solution) so Answer Overflow indexes it for the next person.
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