Cowork: Claude Code process exited with code 1 — Failed to create bridge sockets after 5 attempts (all tasks, after VM auto-update to 2.1.111)

Summary

All Cowork tasks fail immediately after an automatic update of the Claude Code VM binary today (April 16, 2026). The Claude Code process inside the VM exits with code 1 on every task, including trivial ones like "Is Claude Cowork working?".

Error

From ~/Library/Logs/Claude/cowork_vm_node.log:

[warn] [vm-stderr] Error: Failed to create bridge sockets after 5 attempts
[info] [Process] Exited, code=1, signal=null, duration=~1000ms, oom=false

Timeline

• 11:52 AM — ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude-code-vm/2.1.111/claude was updated (file timestamp)
• 12:24 PM — First task failure observed in Cowork
• All tasks have failed since then

Environment

• Claude Code version: 2.1.111
• OS: macOS (Apple Silicon, Darwin 25.4.0)
• Claude Desktop app: latest

Reproduction

1. Open Claude Desktop / Cowork
2. Start any new task (any prompt, any project or no project)
3. Observe immediate failure: "Something went wrong — Claude Code process exited with code 1"

Troubleshooting Already Attempted

• Quit and relaunched the Claude desktop app
• Restarted the Mac
• Verified no VPN or active firewall
• Installed socat via Homebrew (brew install socat 1.8.1.1) — did not resolve
• The cmd=/usr/local/bin/claude binary runs inside a Linux VM; Mac-side socat is not relevant

Additional Context

The spawn log shows the VM starts successfully (Spawn succeeded) and the OAuth token is approved, but the process exits within ~1 second with the bridge socket error. The issue appears to be in how the 2.1.111 VM hypervisor sets up internal VM networking.

This is a regression — Cowork was working normally before the auto-update this morning.