Claude Desktop sign in opens the wrong account: why and how to fix it

How Claude Desktop sign-in works

According to Anthropic's help center, Claude Desktop offers two ways to log in to your Claude account: Continue with Google, or Continue with email, which sends a login link to your inbox. As of October 2026, Claude doesn't support a dedicated password.

Either way, part of the process happens outside the app, in your browser or email. When you confirm, the browser passes the result back to Claude Desktop so the app can finish signing in. With one copy of Claude on your Mac, that hand-off always reaches the right place.

Why the second account opens the first window

If you run more than one copy of Claude Desktop, for example by launching a second copy with its own data folder or by using profiles, every copy is the same Claude app as far as macOS is concerned. When the browser hands sign-in back, macOS picks which Claude window receives it. Often that's the copy that was already open, which is the one already signed in to your first account.

The result looks like the sign-in failed or switched accounts. The new copy still shows its sign-in screen, the old copy comes to the front, and the sign-in can finish there instead. Nothing is broken; the hand-off just went to the wrong copy.

The fix: one copy running while you sign in

1. Quit every other copy of Claude Desktop, so only the one you want to sign in to is running.
2. In that copy's window, start sign-in.
3. Complete the step in your browser or email.
4. Finish in the same window, and check that the account shown is the one you meant.
5. Reopen your other copies. They keep their own sign-ins.

You only need to do this once per account. After that, each copy stays signed in to its own account and you can run them together.

Another option: the email code

Anthropic's help center describes a second route for email login. If you request the login email on one device and click the link on a different device, such as your phone, you get a verification code instead, which you then enter on the device where you requested it.

Because you type that code into the window in front of you, there may be no browser hand-off to go astray. It's worth trying if quitting your other copies isn't convenient, though the method above is the more reliable one.

Signing in to Switch profiles

Switch profiles meet the same quirk, because each profile opens Anthropic's own Claude Desktop app, unmodified, pointed at its own data folder. The fix is the same: quit the other profiles, start sign-in from the new profile's window and finish there.

Once it's done, each profile keeps its own sign-in and chats, and profiles can stay signed in at the same time. Each one has its own color and Dock icon, so you can see at a glance which account a window belongs to. The setup guide walks through first sign-in for each profile.

If both plans use the same email

You may not need a second copy at all. If you have a personal plan and a Team or Enterprise plan on the same email address, Anthropic's help center says you can switch between them by clicking your initials in the bottom left corner and selecting the other account. Separate copies of the app are only needed for accounts with different emails.

Either way, each account keeps its own plan and usage limits, and rotating accounts to get around limits can conflict with Anthropic's terms. For an overview of every method, read Claude Desktop with multiple accounts.