Cowork silent fail on Windows 11 Home

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing issues and this hasn't been reported yet
• [x] This is a single bug report (please file separate reports for different bugs)
• [x] I am using the latest version of Claude Code

What's Wrong?

Environment:

Windows 11 Home (10.0.26200)
Claude Desktop v1.569.0 (Microsoft Store)
CPU: x64, 32GB RAM
WSL2 installed and working
Virtual Machine Platform: Enabled
Windows Hypervisor Platform: Enabled
What happens:
Cowork tab shows "Setting up Claude's workspace... 0%" indefinitely. After multiple reinstalls over 3 months, the latest version now shows "Failed to start Claude's workspace — VM service not running. The service failed to start." but no guidance on what's actually wrong.

Root cause (from cowork_vm_node.log):
The Cowork VM requires the full Hyper-V management service (vmms), which is not available on Windows 11 Home edition. Windows Home includes vmcompute (used by WSL2) but not vmms or vmplatformapi.dll. The VM files download successfully (~9GB rootfs.vhdx, initrd, vmlinuz, smol-bin.vhdx), but the "Configuring Windows VM service" step fails because the required Hyper-V components don't exist on Home.

Error history from logs (Jan–Apr 2026):

Jan 2026: yukonSilver not supported, then @ant/claude-swift module not found
Feb 11: Files downloaded OK but copyfile smol-bin.vhdx failed (errno -4094)
Feb 12: ENOSPC: no space left on device during warm download (9GB rootfs + compressed copies)
Feb–Mar: Repeated copyfile failures
Apr 5: Files finally download and copy successfully, but VM service not running. The service failed to start.
What should happen:

Cowork should detect Windows Home edition before downloading 9GB+ of VM files and show a clear message: "Cowork requires Windows 11 Pro or higher (Hyper-V not available on Home edition)"
Alternatively, consider supporting Windows Home via WSL2 backend instead of full Hyper-V
The 3-month "0% spinner" experience with no error was particularly poor — earlier versions should have surfaced the incompatibility
Workaround:
Enabling Hyper-V on Windows Home via the DISM package workaround may resolve this (untested).

What Should Happen?

.

Error Messages/Logs

.

Steps to Reproduce

try to get cowrok going on a win 11 home pc

Claude Model

Not sure / Multiple models

Is this a regression?

No, this never worked

Last Working Version

_No response_

Claude Code Version

.

Platform

Anthropic API

Operating System

macOS

Terminal/Shell

Terminal.app (macOS)

Additional Information

_No response_