Post Content Anthropic has shipped its own OpenClaw rival with tighter security controls and narrower scope. (Express Image)
Anthropic has unveiled a new feature that lets developers send messages to a running Claude Code session on their laptops from messaging chat apps such as Telegram and Discord installed on their phones.
Claude Code Channels uses MCP-based plugins to create a two-way chat between a developer and their local Claude Code session. It has currently been released under research preview with support limited to Telegram, Discord, and Fakechat. The feature runs on Claude Code v2.1.80 or later versions, and requires a claude.ai login, which means that developers who access the AI coding assistant through organisational API keys cannot use it.
Anthropic’s latest Claude Code feature comes amid the widespread automation of software development workflows, fueled by the surging popularity of agentic AI platforms such as OpenClaw. Similar to Channels, early setups of OpenClaw were focused on running Claude Code through WhatsApp on your phone. However, OpenClaw developer projects have since evolved into orchestrating AI agents to book flights, control smart home devices, and manage social media campaigns across multiple platforms and devices in a structured manner.
Yet, the security tradeoffs associated with OpenClaw have sparked the need for safety-focused forks and alternatives. At last week’s GTC 2026, Nvidia introduced a software tool kit called NemoClaw that is designed to be integrated with OpenClaw in order to help specialised agents or ‘claws’ run safely in an enterprise context, via a contained virtual environment.
Unlike the chipmaker, Anthropic has shipped its own OpenClaw rival with tighter security controls and narrower scope. The Channels launch also highlights its competitive posture, arriving less than two months after Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, joined Anthropic arch-nemesis OpenAI. Anthropic previously sent a cease-and-desist letter to Steinberger over the original OpenClaw project name ‘Clawd’.
Channels is reportedly based on an inversion of MCP (Model Context Protocol) flows, where a user sends a request to Claude, which decides to call a tool and send a request to the MCP server. The tool runs and returns data, which Claude turns into its final response to the user query.
Channels work the other way around. Telegram’s plugin is connected to the Bot API and scans for incoming messages. Each Channel is actually an MCP server running locally alongside Claude Code as a plugin-backed process. When a new message is sent, it gets wrapped as a
