Cowork – Cannot create files/folders when workspace path contains accented characters (macOS)

Description

When a user selects a folder with an accented character in its name (e.g., "démo cowork") as the Cowork workspace on macOS, Claude is unable to create files or subdirectories inside it. The operations appear to succeed but nothing is actually written to disk.

Steps to reproduce

1. On macOS, create a folder with an accented character in its name (e.g., "démo cowork") (in an iCloud folder)
2. Open Cowork and select that folder as the workspace
3. Ask Claude to create a file or subfolder inside it

Expected behavior
The file or folder is created successfully.

Actual behavior
The creation silently fails — no file or folder appears in the workspace.

Root cause hypothesis
This is likely a Unicode normalization mismatch. macOS HFS+/APFS uses NFD (decomposed) normalization for filenames, while the Linux sandbox environment where Cowork runs expects NFC (composed). This causes the path to be unresolvable when it contains accented characters.

Environment

• macOS (version: 26.3)
• Cowork desktop app (version: Claude 1.1.4498 (24f768) 2026-02-26T19:47:09.000Z )