[BUG] Sandbox VM process name is garbled (mojibake) in macOS Activity Monitor on Japanese locale

Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Feb 10, 2026 by tatsuhitofuruta Closed Feb 13, 2026

Description

The sandbox VM process spawned by Claude Code displays a garbled (mojibake) name in macOS Activity Monitor when the system locale is Japanese.

Displayed name: Claude の莉3證り繊城す繊り繊才繊シ繊荏せ
Expected name: Something readable (e.g., Claude のサンドボックス or an ASCII name)

Environment

  • macOS: Sequoia 15.x (Darwin 25.2.0)
  • Locale: Japanese (ja_JP)
  • Architecture: Apple Silicon (arm64)
  • Process: com.apple.Virtualization.VirtualMachine via Apple Virtualization.framework

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Launch Claude Code on a macOS system with Japanese locale
  2. Execute any Bash command (triggers sandbox VM creation)
  3. Open Activity Monitor
  4. Find the com.apple.Virtualization.VirtualMachine process

Observed Behavior

The process name appears as garbled text: Claude の莉3證り繊城す繊り繊才繊シ繊荏せ

This looks like a UTF-8 string being decoded as Shift_JIS or another legacy Japanese encoding.

Screenshot

The process details show:

  • Executable: com.apple.Virtualization.VirtualMachine.xpc
  • Open files include: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/vm_bundles/claudevm.bundle/efivars.fd
  • CPU: ~0.72% (idle)

Notes

  • A very similar issue exists in Docker Desktop for Mac: https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/7481
  • The root cause is likely the VM display name containing non-ASCII characters that are not correctly encoded when passed to the Virtualization.framework API
  • Functionality is not affected — this is a cosmetic issue only

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