---
title: "Assistants"
canonical_url: "https://meingpt.com/en/docs/api/assistants"
language: en
---

# Assistants

AI assistant endpoints

## Timing for Synchronous API Calls

An assistant run via the API is synchronous and provides no separate status or polling endpoint. The request stays open until the assistant finishes or an infrastructure timeout occurs, typically around **five minutes**. This is independent of your own HTTP client's timeout — if your client's timeout is shorter, it aborts the connection first and you never see the assistant's response, even though the run may have kept going server-side. Configure your client's timeout to cover the expected run duration. Processing large or multiple files, complex tool calls, or large outputs can push a run into this window. Plan accordingly for long-running calls, or trigger them asynchronously via an external automation (e.g. Make) that checks completion separately.

## Attaching files to an assistant run

You can attach files to an assistant run. The size limit actually enforced today is **50 MB per file** — the 150 MB figure mentioned in parts of the API reference is not the value checked server-side. Check the [API reference](/en/docs/api/assistants) for the current value if in doubt, since it can change.

Connectors (e.g. Outlook, SharePoint, Confluence) attached to an assistant are available on an assistant run via the external API. They resolve against the connections of the user account owning the API key being used — that account has to have connected the service itself. This holds for every personal connection (OAuth connectors and your own MCP servers): another member's connection is never used, so an assistant whose connector is not connected under the API key's account simply runs without it. The exception are team-shared custom MCP servers authenticating through fixed headers stored with the server: those act as a service account and work for every caller, exactly as they do in chat.

Certain built-in tools are also **not automatically available** on an assistant run via the external API, even if they're visible for the same assistant in interactive chat: **web search, the Code Sandbox, slide generation, artifacts (documents), and image generation** are, in chat, partly enabled only through a chat-wide toggle rather than being permanently saved on the assistant. Via the API, they're only available if explicitly attached as a tool on the assistant itself (the "Tools" tab in the assistant editor). Data pools, files uploaded directly to the assistant, and the Meetings knowledge source are not affected by this - they're stored on the assistant itself and work via the API the same way they do in chat.

Data pools (data sources / RAG) attached to an assistant are available on an assistant run via the external API too. This requires that the user account owning the API key being used has been granted access to that data pool (see the "Access control" section in the data pools document). This access is independent of who the assistant itself was shared with.

You check or change a data pool's sharing settings under **Settings → Data sources** - this area is only visible to workspace admins. If you are not an admin yourself, ask an admin to check the sharing settings for the affected data pool, even if you created the assistant yourself.

## Reading the model's reasoning content

For models that produce a visible thinking step (the "Reasoning tag" models — see [Models](/en/docs/platform/models)), that reasoning is included in the `messages` array of the run response, not in `text`. It shows up as one or more content parts with `type: "reasoning"` inside an assistant message, alongside `type: "text"` and any tool-call parts:

```json
{
  "role": "assistant",
  "content": [
    { "type": "reasoning", "text": "..." },
    { "type": "text", "text": "..." }
  ]
}
```

To extract it, iterate over `messages`, keep the entries with `role: "assistant"`, and collect the `text` of every content part where `type` is `"reasoning"`.

This applies to the **Assistants Run API** only. The [Completions API](/en/docs/api/completions) does not return reasoning content - its response only contains `choices[0].message.content` and `tool_calls`, with no equivalent field.

Whether reasoning parts are present, and how detailed they are, depends on the model and its reasoning effort - some models reason internally without emitting a visible trace at all, and reasoning effort/level can't currently be set via the API (see [Completions](/en/docs/api/completions)).

## Finding the AssistantId

1. Go to edit mode for your assistant
2. In the URL, you'll find the AssistantId after `/assistants/`

![AssistantId in Assistant edit mode](/images/assistants/find_assistantID.png)