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

Re:Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS ... by quinncom on Monday March 02, 2026 @12:22PM (#47220984)

I accidentally clicked the Claude Cowork button inside the Claude desktop app. I never used it. I didn't notice anything at the time, but a week later I discovered the huge VM file on my disk.

It would be really nice to ask the user, “Are you sure you want to use Cowork, it will download and install a huge VM on your disk.”

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Re:Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS ... by divan on Monday March 02, 2026 @02:55PM (#47223216)

Same. I work on M3 Pro with 512GB disk, and most of the time I have aroung 50GB free that goes down to 1GB often quite quick (I work with video editing and photos and caches are agressive there). I use apps like Pretty Clean and some own scripts (for brew clean, deleting Flutter builds, etc). So every 10GB used is a big deal for me.

Also discovered that VM image eating 10GB for no reason. I have Claude Desktop installed, but almost never use it (mostly Claude Code).

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Re:Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS ... by ephou7 on Monday March 02, 2026 @01:43PM (#47222200)

Jesus Christ what kind of potatos are you using when 10 GB of disk space are even noticable for you?

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Re:Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS ... by quinncom on Monday March 02, 2026 @03:08PM (#47223385)

If I had been tethering to mobile hotspot at the time it would have instantly used 500 pesos of data. That’s 3x my monthly electric bill.

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Re:Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS ... by wredcoll on Monday March 02, 2026 @07:29PM (#47226274)

Must be an apple thing

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