When your AI says it has no atbridge.ai tools

In short: the AI app can’t find the atbridge.ai command. Give it the absolute path to atbridge.ai (which atbridge, or ~/.atbridge/bin/atbridge) as the command in its MCP config, then fully quit and restart the app — closing the window isn’t enough.

If Claude Desktop (or Cursor) tells you it has no atbridge.ai tools available — or its MCP status dot is red — the usual cause is that the AI app can’t find the atbridge.ai command.

The fix

Give your AI app the absolute path to atbridge.ai.

Windows

Find the path. In PowerShell:

(Get-Command atbridge).Source

If that prints nothing, atbridge.ai isn’t on this shell’s PATH — but it’s always installed at %USERPROFILE%\.atbridge\bin\atbridge.exe.

Open claude_desktop_config.json (or your Cursor MCP config) and use the full path as the command:

"command": "C:\\Users\\you\\.atbridge\\bin\\atbridge.exe"

Note the doubled backslashes — JSON requires it.

macOS / Linux

Find the path:

which atbridge

If that prints nothing, use the install location directly — the binary is always at ~/.atbridge/bin/atbridge.

Open claude_desktop_config.json (or your Cursor MCP config) and use the full path as the command (write it out in full — no ~):

"command": "/Users/you/.atbridge/bin/atbridge"

Fully quit the AI app (Cmd-Q on macOS, File → Quit on Windows — closing the window isn’t enough), then restart.

Other things to check

• Is Thunderbird running? atbridge.ai starts without Thunderbird, but tool calls fail until Thunderbird is open.
• Is the atbridge.ai add-on installed and enabled? Tools → Add-ons in Thunderbird.
• Did you run atbridge bridge install after installing atbridge.ai? That step connects atbridge.ai to Thunderbird.

Still stuck?

Email contact@atbridge.ai with the output of:

atbridge bridge status --pretty

We usually answer within a day.

Where to go next

• When activation fails
• When Thunderbird can’t see your mail