For meetings hosted outside your app’s Zoom account, Meeting SDK joins must be user-attributed starting March 2, 2026 - Zoom explicitly says “Anonymous joins will no longer be supported” for external meetings when joining with the Meeting SDK. In practice that means “JWT signature only” isn’t enough; the join must be authorized with either a ZAK token (Zoom Access Key) or an OBF token (On Behalf Of token).
If your residents truly have no Zoom accounts, there isn’t a supported way to keep them “anonymous” and join external meetings via the Meeting SDK, because Zoom requires the attributed user to be a Zoom user and present (reusing a service/shared user won’t work) as described by Zoom staff here.
Your realistic paths are: (1) require residents to authenticate as Zoom users and join with their own ZAK, or (2) only embed meetings hosted in the same account as your SDK app and send external meetings to the standard Zoom join flow; if you do embed external meetings, you’ll need OAuth to fetch OBF via the user:read:token scope as noted in Zoom’s FAQ excerpt here.
For a deeper dive, take a look at Recall.ai - we’ve supported thousands of developers working through these exact implementation details