Shopify Theme Dev - Access Token Provided is expired

I have reproduced the issue on the latest CLI version.

Yes, I am on the latest version

I have searched existing posts and this report is not a duplicate.

Yes, this isn’t a duplicate

In which of these areas are you experiencing a problem?

Theme

Expected behavior

No Errors?

Actual behavior

When running shopify theme dev, multiple times a day in the browser I will get this error message:
“The access token provided is expired, revoked, malformed, or invalid for other reasons.”
(Just this, no HTML etc.)

It was raised on top of this issue: CLI > Theme Dev > cart ajax 401 but alas, that seems to have gone dead.

Reproduction steps

See request ID d3d40337-5d50-40ae-a8f6-de1238853918-1776936419 as an example.

Verbose output

N/A

Operating system

Windows 11

CLI version

3.94.3

Shell

Git Bash

Nodejs version

24.6.0

What language and version are you using in your application?

N/A

Hey again @ceri_waters - hope all’s well, and thanks for flagging this with the request ID.

I took a look at the request ID you shared, and it does look like the preview request is failing with an expired bearer token rather than a theme/cart-specific error.

One thing I noticed is that the request ID you shared looks to be from CLI 3.93.2, while you mentioned you’re now on 3.94.3. If you’re still seeing this multiple times a day on 3.94.3, could you share a fresh request ID from one of those newer failures?

It would also be helpful to confirm whether you’re authenticating with your Shopify account, or using a Theme Access/custom app token through --password or SHOPIFY_CLI_THEME_TOKEN.

In the meantime, restarting shopify theme dev makes sense as a temporary workaround if it’s refreshing the session locally, but I’ll keep digging on our end once we have a current request ID.

Hope this helps! If this doesn’t solve it let me know, happy to dig in further.