Resolving 'refresh_token_reused' Token Failures

What's Happening\n\nYou are seeing a refresh_token_reused error because multiple OpenClaw agents are attempting to refresh the same OpenAI OAuth token simultaneously. OAuth tokens are single-use; when Agent A successfully refreshes, the token becomes invalid for Agent B, which then triggers a spurious 401 error and causes your model to fail over.\n\n## The Fix\n\nThe most reliable fix is to force a fresh authentication state. Log out of the cli and re-authenticate to clear the stale token chain:\n\nopenclaw models auth logout --provider openai-codex\nopenclaw models auth login --provider openai-codex --method oauth\n\nIf you are using a dedicated CLI tool alongside OpenClaw, ensure you are logged into both consistently. Some users reported that re-syncing their local 'codex cli' credentials effectively resolves the race condition by resetting the underlying auth store state.\n\n## Why This Occurs\n\nOAuth refresh tokens, by design, are invalidated as soon as they are used to generate a new access token. In multi-agent setups, if two instances of OpenClaw try to hit the refresh endpoint at the exact same millisecond, the first request succeeds, but the second receives a 'refresh_token_reused' response from OpenAI. Currently, OpenClaw treats this as a hard failure instead of attempting to reload the auth configuration to see if the token was already updated by a sibling process.\n\n## Prevention\n\nThis is a known architectural issue. As a short-term precaution, avoid restarting all agents at the same time to prevent concurrent refresh requests. Long-term, the OpenClaw team is investigating internal mutex locking to serialize token refresh requests per profile. Monitor progress at https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/issues/26322 for incoming patches regarding refresh serialization.

Last Updated: April 2026