telegram | Friends of the Crustacean 🦞🤝 | Page 1

brave plank Apr 20, 2026, 12:47 AM

#

Fresh OpenClaw install on macOS Mac Studio (v2026.4.15).
Onboarded fine, dashboard works, can chat with the agent in the browser dashboard.

Telegram bot:

Created via BotFather, token added
Channels page shows Configured: Yes, Running: Yes, Mode: polling, Probe ok
My Telegram user ID added to Allow From
Anthropic API key configured with custom provider (anthropic-messages, baseUrl https://api.anthropic.com, model claude-opus-4-7)

When I message the bot, I get "401 authentication error" in Telegram.

Logs show repeated errors on every message:

Gateway restart didn't fix it. How do I complete the device pairing?

leaden creekBOT Apr 20, 2026, 12:47 AM

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late crestBOT Apr 20, 2026, 12:47 AM

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slender sparrowBOT Apr 20, 2026, 12:52 AM

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Those log lines are device pairing, not BotFather token auth.

telegram/native-approvals means Telegram auto-enabled native exec approvals, then tried to open an operator connection to the Gateway and got rejected with pairing required.

Do this on the Mac Studio:

openclaw devices list
openclaw devices approve <requestId>

A couple gotchas:

approve the latest request, retries can supersede older requestIds
a gateway restart alone won’t fix this, because the pending device still needs approval
docs: https://docs.openclaw.ai/cli/devices and https://docs.openclaw.ai/channels/pairing

#

If you don’t care about Telegram-native exec approvals, you can also just disable that feature:

{
  channels: {
    telegram: {
      execApprovals: { enabled: false }
    }
  }
}

Then restart the gateway.

Also, for a one-owner Telegram bot, I’d switch DMs to durable allowlist mode instead of pairing mode:

#

{
  channels: {
    telegram: {
      dmPolicy: "allowlist",
      allowFrom: ["<your numeric telegram user id>"]
    }
  }
}

Telegram docs: https://docs.openclaw.ai/channels/telegram

If it still sends “401 authentication error” after either approving the device or disabling execApprovals, then the pairing warning was incidental and we should look at the real provider error next. In that case, paste:

#telegram