Claude Desktop/Cowork VM bundle silently consumed ~9 GiB and left disk nearly full while CLI was 2.1.148

Summary

I noticed a process shown as Claude Code 2.1.148 downloading a large amount of data. On investigation, the machine had almost no free disk space left and the large Claude-related payload was the Desktop/Cowork VM bundle, not the normal CLI config/cache.

Environment

• macOS: Apple Silicon Mac, user install
• Claude Code CLI before update: 2.1.148
• Claude Code CLI after update: 2.1.150
• CLI path before update: ~/.local/bin/claude -> ~/.local/share/claude/versions/2.1.148
• Claude Desktop app was installed at /Applications/Claude.app

Local evidence

Before cleanup:

Filesystem        Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk3s1s1   460Gi    12Gi   126Mi    99%    /

~/.claude                         756M
~/.claude/plugins                 539M
~/.claude/plugins/cache           388M
~/Library/Application Support/Claude/vm_bundles/claudevm.bundle   9.1G

Largest files in the bundle:

~/Library/Application Support/Claude/vm_bundles/claudevm.bundle/rootfs.img      10G apparent size
~/Library/Application Support/Claude/vm_bundles/claudevm.bundle/rootfs.img.zst  2.0G
~/Library/Application Support/Claude/vm_bundles/claudevm.bundle/sessiondata.img 41M

At the moment of inspection, lsof -nP -iTCP -sTCP:ESTABLISHED did not show an active Claude/Anthropic TCP connection, but the Desktop native host was running:

/Applications/Claude.app/Contents/Helpers/chrome-native-host chrome-extension://fcoeoabgfenejglbffodgkkbkcdhcgfn/

After deleting the Desktop VM bundle and uninstalling/removing Desktop support files, free space recovered to about 10 GiB, while the CLI remained intact and updated successfully:

claude --version
2.1.150 (Claude Code)

Filesystem        Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk3s1s1   460Gi    12Gi    10Gi    54%    /

Expected behavior

Claude Desktop/Cowork should not silently download or retain a multi-GB VM image in a way that can drive the system volume to near-zero free space, especially when the user primarily expects the standalone Claude Code CLI to be the active component.

Actual behavior

The Desktop/Cowork VM bundle under ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/vm_bundles/claudevm.bundle consumed about 9.1 GiB and left the system volume at about 126 MiB free. This was easy to confuse with the Claude Code CLI because the visible version/process naming was 2.1.148.

Request

Please add guardrails and visibility for this VM bundle download/cache path:

• make Desktop/Cowork clearly disclose the VM bundle download size and location,
• avoid repeated or unnecessary redownloads,
• enforce free-space checks before downloading/unpacking,
• expose a supported cleanup command/UI for vm_bundles,
• clarify the relationship between Claude Desktop/Cowork VM assets and the standalone Claude Code CLI.

This appears related to existing reports about rootfs.img / Cowork VM disk usage, but this report is from the perspective of a user seeing the Claude Code CLI version/process name and nearly exhausting the system disk.