Anthropic's Claude Desktop app is causing major performance issues for macOS users running the cowork feature. The feature creates a 10GB VM bundle at `~/Library/Application Support/Claude/vm_bundles/claudevm.bundle/rootfs.img` that never gets cleaned up automatically. Users report extremely slow startup times, UI lag, and sluggish responses after using cowork.

Performance degrades continuously even during single sessions, with CPU usage climbing from ~24% to over 55% idle after just minutes of use. The app also generates heavy swap activity on systems with limited RAM. Even after manually deleting the VM bundle and cache directories—which provides an initial 75% performance improvement—problems return within minutes, suggesting a memory leak or accumulating background processes.

On 8GB RAM systems, the issue is particularly severe. The VM bundle regenerates almost immediately after deletion, making it impossible to maintain stable performance without frequent restarts. The workaround requires quitting Claude Desktop and manually removing multiple cache directories, but this only provides temporary relief. Tasks that previously failed or hung become usable after cleanup, but the underlying problem persists. This bug affects users trying to leverage Claude's collaborative features, essentially breaking the cowork functionality on lower-memory macOS devices.