Anthropic’s Claude Cowork now runs on desktop, web, and mobile, letting tasks continue in the cloud even when the computer is off, and the new usage data shows that over 90% of its real‑world applications are non‑coding work such as business operations and content creation.
Claude Desktop automatically starts a Hyper‑V virtual machine named Vmmem that consumes about 1.8 GB of RAM on both Windows and macOS, a problem tracked for 105 days on GitHub, with detailed analysis of its cause, extreme cases, and five mitigation steps ranging from a hidden config toggle to disabling system features.
The author built nine Cowork slash‑command prompt templates for Claude, measured a median of 47 minutes of manual keyboard time versus an 8‑hour day, and demonstrated a real‑world weekly saving of 34 hours by automating daily, weekly and research tasks with explicit termination rules and role definitions.
Amid a frenzy of AI headlines, Anthropic quietly released seven substantial product updates across Claude Code, claude.ai, and Cowork, adding 13 enterprise plugins, a private plugin market, cross‑app orchestration, a Chrome Quick Mode that triples speed, remote control, scheduled tasks, auto‑memory, new /simplify and /batch skills, and a free Memory feature with an import tool.
Simon Willison instructed Claude Cowork to explore its own application bundle, revealing that the AI runs inside a full Ubuntu 22.04 virtual machine on macOS via Apple’s Virtualization.framework, protected by a dual sandbox of VM isolation and Bubblewrap, with strict user and syscall restrictions.
