Recently I needed to create an OAuth around Machine to Machine authentication here The docs are good but I must have missed something obvious or maybe I just well missed something obvious. Basically I just kept getting Unauthenticated. and this makes sense since I received the token using grant_type:client_credentials client_id:1 client_secret:foobar So after following the docs I had to then to the following Route::middleware('auth:api')->get('/user', function (Request $request) { return $request; }); with