I believe this is caused by having invalid credentials for your self-managed backend. The error is not as clear on this as it could be though - opened https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/issues/13007 to track improving the error message. If you are seeing this even with valid credentials - would love any additional notes you might have in the issue!

This happens when I try to start a fresh project. I checked all the environment vars on my machine and non are set. Anything in particular I should grab for the issue?

Depends on your backend. You need the normal env vars / config files for AWS, GCP, Azure or whatever you're using. The credentials associated with various Pulumi provider objects are not used for this step.

I’m using the native AWS config file is all