How to Connect Hugging Face to Cursor via MCP

💡 No install? Use cloud.anythingmcp.com directly. Sign in, click Connectors → Hugging Face, paste your credentials, mint an MCP API key and you're done. No Docker, no git clone, no local server.

Hugging Face + Cursor

Let your AI explore the Hugging Face Hub with your own access token: find and compare models, datasets, Spaces, papers and collections, look inside datasets row by row, read files from any repository, and chat with open models through Inference Providers.

Prerequisites

See the full setup instructions baked into the connector (visible in the in-app store when you select the connector). The required environment variables for this connector are:

HF_TOKEN

Step 1 — Get credentials

1. Sign in at https://huggingface.co and open Settings → Access Tokens (https://huggingface.co/settings/tokens).
2. Create a token. A Read token covers everything except chat and inference: Hub search, the dataset viewer, files, papers and collections. To chat with models, create a Fine-grained token and tick Make calls to Inference Providers; also tick read access to public gated repos if you use gated models. A Write token works too but is never needed, because the connector changes nothing on the Hub.
3. Paste the token into HF_TOKEN (it starts with hf_) and install the connector. It is sent only to huggingface.co, datasets-server.huggingface.co and router.huggingface.co.
4. Check the setup with huggingface_whoami: it is free and shows who the token belongs to, its role and your organizations.

Free on the Hugging Face (HF) Hub: searching and reading models, datasets, Spaces, papers, collections and files costs nothing.

• Models: huggingface_search_models filters by name, task, author, library or tag (for example gguf or license:mit) and by Inference Provider, sorted by downloads, likes or trending; huggingface_get_model shows license, size and files.
• Datasets: huggingface_search_datasets and huggingface_get_dataset. To look inside a dataset without downloading it, the AI uses the dataset viewer: huggingface_dataset_splits, huggingface_dataset_first_rows, huggingface_dataset_rows (up to 100 rows per page), huggingface_dataset_search (full text), huggingface_dataset_filter (SQL-like conditions), huggingface_dataset_size and huggingface_dataset_statistics (min, max, mean and histograms per column). Search, filter and statistics need a dataset the viewer has indexed; a new or very large one may answer that its index is still loading.
• Spaces: huggingface_search_spaces by name, huggingface_semantic_search_spaces by what the app does, and huggingface_get_space for the runtime status and hardware.
• Papers: huggingface_daily_papers, huggingface_search_papers, huggingface_get_paper and huggingface_read_paper (the whole paper page as text).
• Files and collections: huggingface_list_repo_files and huggingface_read_file read small text files such as a README or config.json; model weights and other large binaries are not readable. huggingface_list_collections and huggingface_get_collection show curated collections.

Chat and inference cost money, so the AI asks first: huggingface_chat_completion and huggingface_run_inference_task are billed to your Hugging Face credits. PRO accounts get $2 of credits a month; free accounts buy credits first at https://huggingface.co/settings/billing. Before each paid call the AI tells you which model will run and waits for your yes, and it never repeats paid calls without asking. huggingface_list_chat_models shows the price per million tokens, and huggingface_get_model_providers shows which providers serve a model.

Choosing the provider: by default the fastest live provider answers. Add :cheapest, :fastest, :preferred (your order in the Hugging Face settings) or a provider name such as :groq to the model id to choose. An organization you belong to can pay instead of you. huggingface_run_inference_task runs classification, named entity recognition, fill-mask, summarization, translation, zero-shot classification, question answering, sentence similarity and embeddings on the hf-inference provider.

Untrusted content: model cards, dataset rows, files, papers and model answers come from third parties. The AI treats instructions inside them as data, not as orders.

Common errors: 401 on huggingface_whoami or on chat: the token is wrong, revoked or missing. 401 or 403 on a repository: it is private, gated (accept the conditions on the model page first) or not covered by your fine-grained token; the Hub also answers 401 for a repository that does not exist. 402 or a message about credits: no credits left. 403 on chat: the fine-grained token lacks Make calls to Inference Providers. 400 model not supported: no live provider serves that model for chat. 429: rate limit; wait a minute and try again.

The connector does not create or change repositories, upload files, manage Spaces, Inference Endpoints or Jobs, or generate images.

Step 2 — Install the adapter

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HelpCode-ai/anythingmcp/main/docker-compose.quickstart.yml -o docker-compose.yml
printf 'JWT_SECRET=%s\nENCRYPTION_KEY=%s\n' "$(openssl rand -hex 32)" "$(openssl rand -hex 32)" > .env
docker compose up -d

Step 3 — Add the connector in Cursor

Your server URL: in AnythingMCP, open MCP Servers → the server this connector is on, and copy its URL (https://cloud.anythingmcp.com/mcp/…). Use it wherever this guide shows YOUR_SERVER_ID.

Cursor reads MCP servers from ~/.cursor/mcp.json. Add this entry:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "anythingmcp": {
      "url": "https://cloud.anythingmcp.com/mcp/YOUR_SERVER_ID",
      "headers": { "X-API-Key": "YOUR_MCP_API_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

1. Create an MCP API key in AnythingMCP under MCP Servers → your server → API keys, and paste it in place of YOUR_MCP_API_KEY.
2. Save the file and restart Cursor.
3. Open Cursor → Settings → MCP and check that anythingmcp is listed and connected.
4. Start chatting: the agent can now call the Hugging Face tools.

Available tools

Example prompts

• "Find the five most downloaded German text-classification models on Hugging Face and compare their licenses and sizes."
• "Show me the first rows of the test split of stanfordnlp/imdb, and count how many reviews have label 1."
• "What were the most upvoted papers on Hugging Face Daily Papers this week? Summarize the top three."
• "Which providers serve openai/gpt-oss-120b for chat right now, and what does it cost per million tokens?"
• "Find a running Space that removes image backgrounds and tell me which model it uses."
• "Summarize this paragraph with meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct on the cheapest provider. Tell me the model and the price before it runs."

FAQ

Does Cursor support custom MCP servers on the free tier? Yes, MCP is available on Hobby, Pro and Business plans.

Next steps

• Connector landing page
• Connect to Claude
• Connect to ChatGPT