Channels — Real-Time Event Streaming from Sessions
Channels stream Claude Code session events to external platforms like Telegram, Discord, and iMessage in real time. They're the outbound complement to MCP push notifications — giving you and your team live visibility into what Claude is doing.
Quick Reference
- →Channels stream session events outward to external platforms
- →Direction: session → external platform (opposite of MCP which goes in)
- →Natively supported: Telegram, Discord, iMessage (as of March 2026)
- →Event types: tool calls, model responses, permission prompts, errors, completions
- →Two-way: respond via Telegram to inject a message back into the session
- →Channels vs MCP: complementary — MCP brings data in, Channels sends events out
- →Use cases: team visibility, mobile monitoring, audit trail
- →Integrates with Dispatch for monitoring cloud-hosted agent runs
What Channels Do
When Claude Code is running a long task — implementing a feature, executing a deployment, running an analysis — a lot happens that you don't see unless you're staring at the terminal. Channels solve this by streaming structured events from the session to external platforms in real time.
Channels are outbound: session events flow to external platforms. This is the opposite of MCP servers, which are inbound: external tools and data sources flow into Claude's context. Channels and MCP are complementary halves of the same communication architecture.
The result is that you can get a Telegram message when Claude starts a risky file deletion, see a Discord notification when a long-running task completes, or have iMessage alert you when Claude encounters a permission it can't resolve — all without watching a terminal.