alt Hacker NewsThe VM itself is for Claude Cowork which does all work within the VM sandbox. That doesn't help answer why they spin it up immediately and don't have a way to disable it though. Just the "why it exists" question.
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Anthropic has pretty consistently been shitty about how they roll out their software. Extreme lack of engineering rigor and thoughtfulness.
The answer is probably as simple as "no one thought not to do that."
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I know different people work on these things so I can't do more than guess about how engineering culture cuts across teams, but given the sheer amount of carelessness and sloppiness in Anthropic's software I have to imagine they're burning investor money in training and inference because the code to do it is as bad as the rest of their software.
It kind of does though. If you want to use the product they'll need the sandbox ready.
If you're not going to give Claude access to anything on your machine, why are you using Desktop instead of web chat? (Real question, I don't use these much!)
If you are, obviously you need the VM.