  We study chaos and scrambling in unitary channels by considering their
entanglement properties as states. Using out-of-time-order correlation
functions to diagnose chaos, we characterize the ability of a channel to
process quantum information. We show that the generic decay of such correlators
implies that any input subsystem must have near vanishing mutual information
with almost all partitions of the output. Additionally, we propose the
negativity of the tripartite information of the channel as a general diagnostic
of scrambling. This measures the delocalization of information and is closely
related to the decay of out-of-time-order correlators. We back up our results
with numerics in two non-integrable models and analytic results in a perfect
tensor network model of chaotic time evolution. These results show that the
butterfly effect in quantum systems implies the information-theoretic
definition of scrambling.
