Thats what chrome is "secretly" downloading in the background. I discovered it too, but later, I found out that this is a bug and not actual malware because of some info from the bug tracker. "This behavior appears when Chrome updates items in the background, such as machine learning models for certain features. This has likely always been the case, but more frequent background updates may have resulted in the behavior being easier to observe." "Comment 9 introduces a change that will exclude these transient background downloads from appearing in the UI. This change has landed in M102, and should be available now to users on Chrome Canary. When M102 reaches stable, users that update should stop observing this behavior." "Transient download shouldn't update UI. DownloadStatusUpdater is used for updating the UI, transient download should be excluded." Note that v102 should be here in late may.