The software itself is not a virus, but it is often flagged by antivirus software due to its installer behavior.

When Ludvig Strigeus wrote the first version of μTorrent in Delphi, his goal was simple: create a BitTorrent client for Windows that didn't suck up system resources like Azureus (now Vuze) did. At the time, many users had low-RAM machines. μTorrent’s single-threaded, lightweight architecture was so efficient that it could run on a Windows 98 machine with 64MB of RAM while outperforming bulkier clients.

If you build a perfect, tiny, free utility that does one thing well, how do you pay your engineers? The venture-backed answer is usually enshittification: first extract value from users, then from creators, then die. μTorrent proved that a pure donation model is rare, and selling out is fatal.