Telegram MCP Server for Posting to a Channel From Claude and ChatGPT

A Telegram MCP server is a small program that gives an AI assistant tools for Telegram. Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor and Codex all speak the Model Context Protocol, so once a server is connected the assistant can call tools such as "send a message" or "send a photo". You ask in plain words, the assistant picks the tool, and the server talks to Telegram.

People who search for a Telegram MCP fall into three groups. Some want to post: turn a release note into a channel post, with a picture, without opening Telegram. Some want to read: summarize their chats, search old messages, answer people. And since early 2026 a third group wants to talk to Claude Code from their phone through a Telegram bot. Each group needs a different kind of server, and the choice decides whether you act as a bot or as yourself.

This page is mostly for the first group: posting to a Telegram channel from Claude or ChatGPT. It also covers what the other two kinds of server do and risk, Anthropic's own Telegram plugin for Claude Code, and the usual reasons a Claude Code Telegram MCP shows as failed. Spreadcast is the worked example for posting.

If you want the wider field first, our roundup of the best social media MCP servers compares every scheduling vendor that runs one, and the Spreadcast social media MCP server page covers the server across all ten networks it posts to. This page stays on Telegram.

No, not on October 17, 2026. Telegram publishes no MCP server and no MCP address to paste into Claude or ChatGPT. Every Telegram MCP server on GitHub, npm or a directory site is built by someone other than Telegram.

What Telegram does publish is documentation written for assistants to read. Telegram's llms.txt index says almost every page of its developer site has a Markdown version at the same address with .md on the end, and points to one page per Bot API method and type. That is useful if you ask Claude or Cursor to write bot code, and it is likely what people mean when they search for Telegram docs MCP. It is documentation, not a server that can post.

Claude's side is similar. Claude's connectors directory, checked on October 17, 2026, lists no connector made by Telegram. The only Telegram mention there is inside a third party connector that wraps many business APIs at once. Anthropic's real Telegram integration lives in Claude Code instead, as a plugin covered further down.

So any Telegram MCP server you connect is someone else's code holding a key to your Telegram presence: either a bot token or, worse, a login to your own account. The first question to ask of any of them is which of the two it holds, because the Bot API and the user account API live under very different rules.

Telegram is direct about clients that log in as a person. Telegram's page on obtaining an api_id says all API client libraries are strictly monitored, that accounts which log in through unofficial clients are automatically put under observation, and that using the API for flooding, spamming or faking subscriber and view counts gets an account banned forever. A user account MCP server is an unofficial client in exactly that sense.

Telegram's API Terms of Service add two rules worth reading before you let an assistant drive your account. Section 1.4 forbids making actions on behalf of the user without the user's knowledge and consent. Section 1.5 forbids using data from Telegram to train, fine tune or otherwise develop or deploy AI models. Whether a given setup crosses those lines is a question for you and Telegram, but an assistant that reads and sends from your account on its own judgment sits close to both.

Then there is the session itself. chigwell's README warns that a Telegram session string grants access to the account it belongs to, and that it must never be committed with the project. It also notes that Telegram forbids one session being used from two IP addresses at once. A session string is a full key: anyone who copies it can read every chat and send as you, and unlike a bot token it cannot be limited to one channel. The MCP security best practices warn that local servers run with the same privileges as the client and can be reached by other processes on your machine, which is a poor home for a key like that.

Bots carry fewer risks but are not free of rules. Telegram's terms for bot developers forbid spamming users with unsolicited messages and say that collecting data to build datasets, machine learning models or AI products, such as scraping public group or channel contents, is always prohibited. For posting your own updates to your own channel, a bot is the right tool. For reading other people's chats into an assistant, think twice whichever server you use.

Yes, Anthropic offers a Telegram integration, but it is not for posting to a channel. Claude Code's channels guide describes channels as MCP servers that push events into a Claude Code session that is already running, so Claude can react while you are away from the terminal. Telegram, Discord and iMessage are included in the research preview, each as a plugin from Anthropic's official plugin marketplace.

The Telegram plugin turns a bot you make into a chat bridge. You message your bot from your phone, the message arrives in your Claude Code session on your computer, Claude does the work against your real files and replies in the same Telegram chat. The plugin's README on GitHub lists three tools for Claude: reply, react with an emoji from Telegram's fixed list, and edit a message the bot sent earlier. It also says plainly that the Bot API exposes neither message history nor search, so the bot sees only messages as they arrive.

The naming causes real confusion. In Claude Code, a channel is the plugin that pushes messages in. In Telegram, a channel is a broadcast feed with subscribers. Searches for a Claude code Telegram channel or a Claude Telegram channel plugin usually mean the first. The plugin is built around a private chat between you and your bot, guarded by pairing and an allowlist, not around publishing posts to your subscribers. If subscribers are what you are after, see our guide on how to grow a Telegram channel.

A few limits from the same guide matter before you try it. Channels need Claude Code signed in with a claude.ai account or a Console API key and are not available on Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud or Microsoft Foundry. The plugins are Bun scripts, so Bun has to be installed. On claude.ai Team and Enterprise, channels stay blocked until an Owner switches them on. Pro and Max users without an organization skip that check. And the bot only answers while Claude Code is running with channels switched on.

Searches for post to Telegram from Claude come from people who want a release note to end up in their channel without copying and pasting. There are three ways to get there, and they suit different people. If you only need to queue posts by hand, Telegram can do that too, as our guide on how to schedule Telegram channel posts shows.

The first is a Bot API server in Claude Code, Claude Desktop or Cursor. You make a bot, add it as an admin of your channel, put its token in the server's settings and ask Claude to send. It costs nothing, and it is the right fit for alerts, build notices or plain text updates. You write the words or let Claude write them, but nothing designs the picture, and the post goes out the moment the tool runs. Claude Code's MCP documentation says a server added there stays private to one project by default, so keep the token out of a shared .mcp.json file.

The second is a user account server. It can post to a channel too, because you are the channel's owner, but it gets there by logging in as you with every power your account has. For posting to your own channel there is no reason to take that risk.

The third is a hosted service with a remote address, which is the only one that works in Claude on the web and on mobile, because those cannot reach a program on your laptop. Anthropic's guide to custom connectors says custom connectors work on Free, Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans, with Free limited to one. Spreadcast is this kind, and the next sections show how it reaches your channel.

Spreadcast is a hosted Telegram MCP server for posting, built for people who make App Store apps. You connect your Telegram channel once in Spreadcast and Spreadcast once in your assistant. The difference from a plain posting server is that Spreadcast also makes the post: it designs the picture or the carousel in your app's brand, writes a caption for Telegram in your brand's voice, and saves the result as a draft for you to approve.

On the Telegram side, Spreadcast uses one bot of its own. You never make a bot or paste a token. Connecting adds the Spreadcast bot to your channel as an admin, through the chat picker that Telegram's bot features page describes: a button that lists your chats by set criteria and sends the one you tap back to the bot. Spreadcast's picker shows only channels where you can add admins who post, and asks Telegram to give the bot one right beyond basic admin access: posting messages. It cannot delete messages, add members, change the channel's name or post stories.

Before it saves the connection, Spreadcast asks Telegram two things directly rather than trusting the picker: that the bot really is an admin with the right to post, and that you are the channel's owner or an admin who can post. Only then does it store the channel. It stores no password, no session and no token for your account, only the channel's id, because every post is sent with Spreadcast's own bot.

A Spreadcast Telegram post can be text alone, text with one picture, an album of up to 10 pictures, or one video of up to 50 MB that you already have. Files are uploaded to Telegram rather than passed as links, so pictures get the 10 MB upload limit instead of 5 MB. Text is checked against the 4,096 character limit before anything is saved, and when it is longer than the 1,024 characters Telegram allows under a picture, Spreadcast posts the picture first and the text as a message right after it. Posts appear under your channel's name, the way Telegram's channel FAQ says every channel post does.

The pictures come from the same design code as the Spreadcast app. A single post comes in one of 11 kinds, such as feature, launch, stat or tutorial, in your app's colors, fonts and logo, with a real screenshot of your app in an iPhone frame when your brand kit has one. A carousel is 3 to 8 slides at 1080 by 1350 pixels in one look, and on Telegram it goes out as one album. Spreadcast makes no AI photos and no videos.

The caption is written for Telegram rather than copied from Instagram. Spreadcast's instructions ask for a channel post of up to three short paragraphs, under 900 characters so it fits under a picture, with no hashtags. It never invents numbers, quotes or features that are not in your notes or your app's listing.

Then it stops. Every new connection saves drafts. A draft waits on your Spreadcast calendar until you approve it, and only then does Spreadcast publish it at the planned time. If you let the connection publish as well, the assistant is told to show you the post, the network and the time and ask before it schedules anything. Scheduling and publishing need the Pro plan. Once a post is out, Spreadcast keeps its link, at t.me with your channel's name for a public channel, and shows your channel's subscriber count.

Searches for a Telegram MCP for Cursor, Codex, Claude Desktop or Docker come from people who want the server next to their code. Bot API servers from GitHub fit there, because each one is a program your editor starts on your machine with the bot token in its environment. The setup is the same idea in every editor: a config entry with the launch command and the token, which the editor reads when it starts.

A Docker image changes where the server runs, not how it reaches Telegram. A user account server in a container still logs in as you, and a container that holds your session string is still a key to your whole account. The same goes for a server you expose over HTTP: chigwell's README warns that its HTTP mode has no authentication and must never sit on a public interface.

Spreadcast needs no program on your machine in any of these tools. In Claude Code you add spreadcast.app/api/mcp as a remote server and sign in through /mcp, or use a key from Settings, AI Assistants, which saves drafts only unless you switch on Can Publish Posts. The exact commands for Claude Code and Cursor are on the social media MCP server page.

It does not post to groups or private chats. The connect flow lists channels only, and Spreadcast refuses a chat that is not a channel. Each Spreadcast account connects one Telegram channel at a time, and connecting a different one replaces it.

It does not read your chats, reply to comments or send messages to people. Spreadcast's bot posts to the channel you chose and answers only the connect steps in its own chat with you.

It does not read views or reactions on posts. It shows your channel's subscriber count and the link to each post, and the rest of the numbers are best checked in Telegram's own channel statistics.

It does not format text with bold or links. Captions go out as plain text, which reads well in a channel and avoids the posts that fail when a stray symbol breaks Telegram's formatting rules.

It is not a replacement for Anthropic's Telegram plugin. If you want to talk to Claude Code from your phone, Claude Code's channels guide is the place to start, and the two can run side by side with their own bots. For the bigger picture of where Telegram fits among the networks an app can use, our guide to promoting an app on social media has a Telegram section.