Anthropic has been in the headlines a lot lately, primarily due to its latest revenue and valuation figures, along with its release of its state-of-the-art (SOTA) Fable model. While its flagship product, Claude, may be very popular among millions of users, a lot of them are now reporting memory issues when using the tool.
Over on Claude Code's GitHub repository, an issue raised in February has been gaining traction once again. Basically, Claude Desktop on Windows spins up a 1.8GB Hyper-V virtual machine if you use Claude Cowork or agent mode even once. This happens on each launch of Claude Code even if you plan to use the tool in chat mode only.
Several users have upvoted this bug and stated that it's happening on their machine as well. However, it seemingly affects only Claude desktop users on Windows, not customers of the CLI or any other platform. Once the bug is triggered, it also shows a Vmmem process in Task Manager, indicating CPU usage of 0% and RAM utilization of a whopping ~1.8GB.
Claude users complain that this process should only spin up when you explicitly launch agent mode or Cowork in Claude, with session files efficiently cleaned up after use. Additionally, they are calling for Claude to gracefully handle the absence of virtual machine-based infrastructure, without compromising on chat performance.
It's unclear when this issue originated or what the root cause behind it is, but people are once again actively engaging in the GitHub thread as well as Hacker News. You can also find other technical details and log events over on GitHub.
It's unclear if Anthropic will look into this issue, especially since it's already been reported for a few months. However, the bug is also causing major annoyance for users, with many claiming that it has led them to uninstall Claude Code on desktop, as a concrete workaround is not yet known.
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