A bug report against the Claude Desktop app says it spawns a 1.8GB Hyper-V virtual machine on every launch on Windows, even for chat-only use, and it has climbed to the top of the tracker.
The reporter traced it with PowerShell: WSL, Docker and Windows Sandbox are all disabled, yet opening the app triggers the Hyper-V Host Compute Service, which starts a vmwp.exe process hosting a full VM that shows up as "Vmmem" at roughly 1,800MB. On a 16GB laptop that is over 11 per cent of total memory gone before you type anything. Kill the VM and the app immediately respawns it. The filed fix is simple: fall back to chat-only mode when the machine is not needed, rather than booting one unconditionally.
It is a small thing, but it captures a pattern in agentic desktop apps, where heavyweight sandbox machinery meant for running code gets loaded for everyone, including users who only ever send text.