A developer investigating unusually high temperature readings on their Mac stumbled upon an unexpected culprit: a cryptocurrency miner quietly eating up the machine’s processing power. The discovery came while using Anthropic’s Claude Code to work on a temperature-monitoring app, with the AI assistant helping to trace the problem to an unauthorised XMRig process running in the background.
The incident was shared by Reddit user UntilHEX, who said Claude Code identified a process called XMRig using approximately 1,175% CPU, equivalent to nearly 12 fully occupied CPU cores. The miner was also pushing the computer’s reported temperature to 112°C, explaining why the machine had been running unusually slowly.
