TLS Interception by Antivirus Breaks Claude Desktop’s Connection; Workaround with AV Exclusions

If Cowork (the Claude desktop companion app) keeps showing "Claude in Chrome is not connected" while the Claude side‑panel works fine, the likely culprit is your antivirus performing TLS inspection on bridge.claudeusercontent.com. Cowork’s Node.js runtime does not trust the Windows system CA store, so it rejects the interception certificate.

Confirm the Issue

Run this in PowerShell to check the certificate issuer:

$req = [System.Net.WebRequest]::Create("https://bridge.claudeusercontent.com")
try { $req.GetResponse() } catch { }
$req.ServicePoint.Certificate | Format-List Subject, Issuer

If the Issuer is your AV brand (Norton, Bitdefender, ESET, Kaspersky, Avast…) instead of a public CA (e.g., Amazon, Let’s Encrypt), that confirms the issue.

Fix

• Add *.claudeusercontent.com and *.anthropic.com to your antivirus’s HTTPS‑scan exclusion list.
• Restart the Cowork application.

Root Cause & Request

This breaks silently for every Windows user with HTTPS scanning enabled. The author suggests Anthropic launch Node with --use-system-ca to respect the system certificate store, which would avoid this entirely.

If you’re using Cowork with Claude and see this error, check your AV exclusions first — it saves hours of debugging.