Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning

Anthropic's Claude Desktop application for macOS is facing a significant performance bug related to its Cowork feature, which allows Claude to work alongside users on coding tasks. The issue, documented in GitHub issue #22543, reveals that the feature creates a 10GB virtual machine bundle (claudevm.bundle/rootfs.img) that's never automatically cleaned up, causing severe performance degradation including slow startup, UI lag, and sluggish responses. Even more concerning, the VM bundle regenerates quickly after manual deletion - users report it returns to 10GB within a day - and the performance issues persist on systems with just 8GB of RAM, suggesting broader compatibility problems.

Technical investigation shows the problem extends beyond just storage consumption. Even after cleaning the VM bundle (reducing storage from 11GB to 639MB), performance degrades within minutes of use, with CPU usage climbing from 24% to 55% at idle and swap activity increasing from 20K to 24K+ swapins. This indicates either a memory leak or accumulating computational work that causes degradation regardless of VM bundle state. The current workaround requires users to periodically quit Claude Desktop and manually delete three directories, providing temporary 75% performance improvements that quickly degrade again. This bug highlights the challenges of implementing persistent AI workspace features while maintaining system stability.