[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.VirtualMachinevia Apple Virtualization.framework
Steps to Reproduce
- Launch Claude Code on a macOS system with Japanese locale
- Execute any Bash command (triggers sandbox VM creation)
- Open Activity Monitor
- Find the
com.apple.Virtualization.VirtualMachineprocess
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
This issue has 3 comments on GitHub. Read the full discussion on GitHub ↗