A bug report filed against the anthropics/claude-code repository reveals that Claude Desktop spawns a 1.8 GB Hyper-V VM on every launch, regardless of whether the user is doing anything that would require a virtual machine. Opening the app for a simple chat conversation triggers the same heavyweight VM provisioning as a full code-execution session.
That matters for any team shipping Claude Desktop to developers or embedding it in an internal toolchain. A 1.8 GB VM allocation on startup is not a rounding error. It hits RAM budgets, slows cold-start times, and can trip Hyper-V permission requirements that do not apply to ordinary desktop apps. On machines where Hyper-V is restricted by policy, the launch may fail entirely.
The issue is filed under the anthropics/claude-code repo, which currently holds over 132k stars and more than 5,000 open issues, signaling a high-volume project where triage time is unpredictable. There is no patch or workaround documented in the source material at the time of writing.
The practical blast radius here is wider than it first appears. Developers who installed Claude Desktop for lightweight use, note-taking, quick queries, or prompt experimentation, are paying a virtualization tax they never opted into. On shared or underpowered machines, a background 1.8 GB VM can crowd out other workloads.
What should you do today? If you are running Claude Desktop on Windows and notice elevated memory usage or Hyper-V activity at launch, this bug is the likely cause. Track the issue directly at the GitHub link above. If your team distributes Claude Desktop internally, consider flagging this to users so they are not chasing phantom memory leaks in unrelated services. Until a fix is confirmed, test whether disabling or suspending Claude Desktop at login reduces the Hyper-V footprint on machines where chat-only use is the norm.