Unfortunately, no, there’s no safe way to fully hide an OpenAI API key in a frontend-only React app. Any key you put in the client code or request headers can be seen in the browser or network tab, so it’s always exposed.

The standard solutions are:
1.Use a backend (Node.js, serverless functions, Firebase Cloud Functions, etc.) to proxy requests. Your React app calls your backend, which adds the API key and forwards the request. This keeps the key secret.
2.Use OpenAI’s client-side tools with ephemeral keys if available (like some limited use cases in OpenAI’s examples), but these are temporary and still limited.

Without a backend, there’s no fully secure way anyone could copy the key and make API calls themselves. For production apps, a backend or serverless proxy is mandatory.