YES if a typical user can natively use Claude Cowork on a Windows box with a Claude Max account by February 15, as intended by Anthropic.
NO if you can't.
1,000According to this: https://gist.github.com/simonw/35732f187edbe4fbd0bf976d013f22c8
VM runs ubuntu 22 LTS which is nearly four years old. There is a newer LTS (24). LLM decision? No benefit to an older LTS, but many more cases of it in the training data.
Uses apple's virtualisation framework. Okay. Closest equivalent would be hyper-v but I don't expect them to use it (not supported on Home edition). They will probably use WSL instead. Okay, they will need to remake the VM for various reasons. Not a huge deal, but I struggle to think of any consumer product for Windows that wraps WSL. Docker does, but it's clearly for developers...
Oh wait, CPU-level virtualisation is off by default on many motherboards, and needs to be enabled in BIOS. This is a bit of a barrier.
WSL1 is easier to run but basically obsolete and probably does not support bubblewrap.
They can't really drop the VM because their sandbox tool does not support windows, and it would be a big task to make it work on windows.
The VM is managed using a Swift native module which is very apple-brained, and apparently unix sockets too. This part is just a complete re-write. Not a huge deal with claude code, I guess.
Strongly suggests "side project that breached containment". If they properly thought this through, they would have developed a Windows sandbox first, battle-tested it, and then skipped the defense-in-depth VM. Now they have some tough decisions to make, and decisions are awful.