March 2, 2026
Cowork or co-wreck?
Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning
Claude’s Cowork turns Macs into laggy storage hogs, and users are roasting
TLDR: Claude’s Cowork feature quietly creates a 10GB virtual machine file on Macs, causing slowdowns and heavy memory use; deleting helps but it returns. Users are split between outrage, memes, and skepticism—some blame virtualization bloat, others dismiss the report as AI-generated noise—yet everyone agrees performance suffers.
Anthropic’s new “Cowork” feature is getting dragged after users discovered it quietly spins up a 10GB virtual machine bundle on macOS—and never cleans it. The result? Claude Desktop slows to a crawl, with high idle CPU and rising “swap” (when your Mac starts using the hard drive as pretend memory). One user says deleting the mystery file brings a shocking 75% speed boost, but it comes right back like a bad roommate.
The community mood is a mix of outrage, memes, and pure skepticism. Tech sleuths like bachittle claim Cowork relies on Apple’s virtualization tool, causing “nested VM” errors and extra lag, arguing a lighter sandbox (like Apple’s “seatbelt” used by OpenAI) would be better. Others pile on with “apps abusing disk” horror stories, like Apple Podcasts hoarding 120GB as “System Data.” The meme crowd is thriving: blitzar declares, “The vibe coding giveth and taketh away,” while skeptics like tbrownaw shrug that “everything uses a few GB” but admit the slowness is real. Then comes the plot twist—Aurornis calls the GitHub report “clearly AI slop,” since it was “Filed via Claude Code,” sparking a meta-fight over whether AI bug reports are trustworthy. TL;DR: users feel blindsided, performance tanks, and the comment section is pure chaos.
Key Points
- •Using Claude Desktop’s Cowork feature on macOS creates a VM bundle that grows to 10GB and is not cleaned up.
- •Deleting vm_bundles, Cache, and Code Cache reduces disk usage drastically and yields ~75% immediate performance improvement.
- •Performance degrades again within minutes, with idle CPU rising and swap activity increasing, suggesting a memory leak or accumulating workload.
- •The VM bundle quickly regenerates to 10GB after each Cowork session, even after manual deletion.
- •Workaround: quit Claude Desktop and delete the VM bundle for temporary improvement; expected behavior includes automatic cleanup and stable performance on 8GB RAM systems.