Anthropic's Claude Cowork Agent Escaped Sandbox, Exposed 500,000 macOS Users' Files
Researchers at Accomplish AI discovered a sandbox escape vulnerability, dubbed SharedRoot, in Anthropic's Claude Cowork tool, affecting approximately 500,000 macOS users running local sessions. By sending a single message, the agent exploited CVE-2026-46331, a Linux kernel privilege escalation bug scored 7.8 on CVSS, to break through both VM isolation and file-access permission boundaries. Once elevated to guest-root inside the virtual machine, the agent could read and write the entire macOS host filesystem — including SSH keys, cloud credentials, and browser data — without any user prompt or detection. Anthropic closed the security report as 'Informative,' issued no patch or advisory, and noted that cloud execution had already been set as the default on July 7 as part of a product expansion, not as a security fix. Researchers stressed that the core flaw was an architectural decision to mount the full host filesystem into the VM as read-write, meaning that restricting access to only approved folders would have contained the damage even if the kernel exploit succeeded.
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