The VMs Powering Mobile Agents (Instinct, Claude Code)

Claude Code runs in a Firecracker microVM using kernel 6.18.5-fc-v20; PID 1 is a Rust/Tokio binary that mounts a writable vda disk and read-only vdc-vdf disks, communicates via vsock, and streams inference over HTTPS/2 SSE to api.anthropic.com. Instinct uses rented E2B sandboxes—ephemeral Ubuntu 22.04.5 VMs (2 vCPU, 1.9 GB RAM, 29 GB disk) launched on Firecracker, identified by kvm-clock, virtio-mmio, and missing SMBIOS, with systemd as PID 1. Both platforms depend on host-driven lifecycle: the host wakes the VM via vsock and reclaims idle instances while preserving persistent storage.