ChatGPT Telegram Bot is a popular open-source Python bot that brings ChatGPT and Claude into Telegram, so you can chat with leading AI models from any device without extra apps or subscriptions to manage. It has earned more than 5,500 stars on GitHub and is actively developed, with its latest updates in 2026.
The bot connects to the OpenAI API (and Anthropic’s) and wraps it in a polished Telegram experience. You can hold streaming conversations with GPT and Claude models, send voice messages that are transcribed with Whisper and answered in text or voice, generate images with DALL·E, and switch between configurable chat modes — assistant personas such as a coding helper, a translator or a movie expert — each with its own system prompt and context. It supports group chats and inline mode, tracks each user’s token usage and balance, and can restrict access with allowlists, making it practical to run for a family, a team or a community. The bot is designed for easy self-hosting with Docker, with configuration through environment variables and optional MongoDB-backed persistence. Because it is self-hosted, conversations stay on infrastructure you control, and its compact, approachable Python codebase has made it a popular base for forks and customized bots.
The bot is free and open source under the MIT license. You bring your own OpenAI/Anthropic API keys and pay those providers for usage.
ChatGPT Telegram Bot is for individuals and community admins who want a fast, private, self-hosted way to give themselves — or their group — convenient access to top AI models inside Telegram.