Both operating systems will get in your way, and they will not tell you why. This page says what you will see, in the words you will see it in, and exactly what to do about each one. Start at the top: the first answer is the one nobody knows about, and it is the one that causes damage quietly.
Nobody has paid Apple or Microsoft to vouch for these builds. There is no Apple Developer ID and no Authenticode certificate — not yet. These are test builds handed to people we know, not software published to the world, and while the beta stays private that is the right trade.
That changes shortly. We go through both signing processes as this moves from a private beta to a public one. At that point the warnings below stop appearing and this page stops being necessary. Until then, they are expected.
That is the whole of it. It says nothing about the file: it is not corrupt, it is not infected, and nothing went wrong with your download. macOS and Windows cannot tell “nobody paid” apart from “nobody knows”, so they say the strongest thing they have and leave you to work out which it is.
You do not have to take our word for it. Every download card carries a SHA-256 behind its Verify this file link. Hash the file you downloaded and compare — if it matches, you have exactly the bytes we published, byte for byte. How to check.
No. Drag it into Applications, eject the image, and open it from there. Do this before anything else on this page.
This is the step nobody knows about, and getting it wrong is invisible. The app opens perfectly well. Things go wrong later, in ways that look like faults in the app or in your account rather than in how you launched it.
.dmg to open it. KnowMonkey ships as a .zip instead — unzip it, and the same rules apply to the folder it unpacks into.Here is what you are avoiding. Launch a downloaded app that is still sitting where it arrived, and macOS does not run it from there. It copies it to a randomised, read-only temporary path and runs that copy — a mechanism called App Translocation. Three things follow, and none of them announce themselves:
This cost an hour on 8 September 2026. A ProtoSentient Platform 0.1.0 disk
image was opened and the app launched straight out of it. 0.1.0 sets its sign-in cookie
Secure while the app's own sidecar serves plain http on a loopback
address, so the browser dropped the cookie and the app said
“No sign-in is in progress — start again” when the sign-in had
already been approved. 0.1.1, which fixes exactly that, was sitting correctly in
/Applications the whole time and was never the copy being run. It did not look
like a launch problem. It looked like a broken account.
No. Nothing is damaged and your download is not corrupt. That wording is what macOS says about an app built with a hardened runtime over an ad-hoc signature.
There is no Open button on that dialog and there is no Open Anyway waiting for you in System Settings either. The only offer is to move the app to the Trash. Do not: one Terminal command clears it.
You get this dialog every time you download one of those two, not sometimes. It is predictable from how each app is built — ProtoSentient Platform and RAVNgraph both carry the hardened runtime, KnowMonkey does not, and that is the entire difference between the two dialogs.
You have KnowMonkey. It is ad-hoc signed but has no hardened runtime, so macOS gives it the milder of the two dialogs — and the milder one has a way out that does not need Terminal.
There is still no Open button on the dialog itself. But this is the one where Open Anyway appears in System Settings afterwards, so the click-only route works for it. The Terminal command works for it too, and is quicker.
One command in Terminal. It works for both dialogs, and it is the only thing that works for the “is damaged” one.
Do this after the app is in /Applications, not before. Open Terminal
and run the line for the app you installed:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/ProtoSentient Platform.app" xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/RAVNgraph.app xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/KnowMonkey.app
It prints nothing when it works. That is success, not a hang — just launch the app normally afterwards.
Two details in that first line are not decoration:
-r. An app is a folder, and the download mark is on files inside it as well as on the bundle.ProtoSentient Platform.app has a space in its name. Without the quotes the shell reads it as two paths and you get xattr: No such file: /Applications/ProtoSentient followed by xattr: No such file: Platform.app, and the app stays blocked. The other two names have no space and need no quotes, though quoting them does no harm.The command removes the download mark. It does not modify the app, and it does not turn any protection off system-wide — it applies to that one app and nothing else.
Only for the “unidentified developer” dialog — so in practice only for KnowMonkey. There is nothing to click for “is damaged”.
On macOS 15 (Sequoia) and later, including macOS 26:
On macOS 14 or earlier you can also right-click the app and choose Open, then Open again in the dialog. Apple removed that shortcut in macOS 15, which is why it is not the first thing listed. On a current Mac it does nothing.
Open Anyway never appears for the “is damaged” dialog. Not after a refused launch, not anywhere in System Settings. If that is the dialog you are looking at, stop hunting for a button and run the command.
No, and you do not need to do anything. Only a browser download gets the mark that triggers these dialogs.
macOS attaches a com.apple.quarantine flag to files that arrive through a
browser. Every download from this site has it, which is why the refusal is guaranteed rather
than occasional. A copy that reached you another way — off a shared drive, by AirDrop,
over scp — carries no such flag, so it simply opens.
The app is identical either way. Same bytes, same signature, same everything — check its SHA-256 if you want to be sure. The dialog is about how the file travelled, not about what is in it. The Applications step still applies: that one has nothing to do with quarantine.
Only ProtoSentient Platform makes you choose. KnowMonkey and RAVNgraph ship one universal build that runs natively on both kinds of Mac.
To find out which you have, open Apple menu → About This Mac:
The download cards are labelled to match, and the downloads page puts the group for your machine first.
An Intel-only build does run on an Apple Silicon Mac — through Rosetta 2, and macOS will put up a dialog offering to install Rosetta if it is not already there. That prompt is genuine and it is fine to accept. But there is no reason to be in it: take the Apple Silicon build, which needs none of that. An Apple Silicon build will not run on an Intel Mac at all.
macOS 10.15 for ProtoSentient Platform and KnowMonkey. macOS 12 for RAVNgraph.
Those are the minimums the builds themselves declare. An older Mac will refuse to launch them, which is a different refusal from the ones above and is not something a command can clear.
Nothing here carries an Authenticode certificate, so SmartScreen has nothing to check against. Windows cannot tell “unsigned” from “unknown”, so it warns about every file on the page.
You get a blue box headed “Windows protected your PC”, and the only button on it says Don't run. There is no second button until you make one appear:
Windows remembers that decision for that copy of that file, so you get the box once rather than on every launch. Replace the file with a new build and you get it again.
That is Mark of the Web. Clear it from the file and the link comes back.
A downloaded file carries a hidden marker saying it came from the internet. On a machine with SmartScreen policy tightened, that marker can remove the More info link entirely, leaving a box you genuinely cannot click past.
Right-click the file → Properties, and at the bottom of the General tab tick Unblock, then OK. Do it on a zip before extracting and every file inside comes out clean. Or, in PowerShell, from the folder you downloaded into:
# confirm it is the file we published, then clear the marker
Get-FileHash .\<file> -Algorithm SHA256
Get-ChildItem -Recurse | Unblock-File
No. Both installers put the app in your own user account, so there is no administrator prompt.
If something does ask you for an administrator password during one of these installs, it did not come from us. Stop and ask.
It has not hung. It is about 288 MB and it sits there looking stalled while it unpacks.
Leave it alone rather than starting it a second time — a second copy running against the same folder is a real problem where waiting is not. The exact byte count is on the download card if you want to know what you are waiting for. RAVNgraph's Windows installer is a tenth of the size and is quick.
Where a Windows build is not downloadable, its card on the downloads page says so and says why, rather than being left off the page.
alfie-cli and Terminal just says killed.
Same cause, no dialog. alfie-cli is not signed at all, so a quarantined copy is
killed outright instead of being refused politely.
You will see zsh: killed and an exit status of 137, or on some
setups nothing at all — the command simply returns and the tool never starts. There is
no dialog and nothing in Console explaining it.
alfie-cli is not on the downloads page. It is handed out beside the app on the
share, and a copy taken off the share carries no quarantine flag and runs. It is only when
the copy reached you through a browser — forwarded as a link, pulled out of a cloud
drive — that this happens. From the folder you put it in:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ./alfie-cli chmod +x ./alfie-cli ./alfie-cli
It needs both lines. chmod +x on its own leaves it being killed, and clearing
the flag on its own leaves it not executable.
Hash it and compare. Each download card has a Verify this file link with the SHA-256 we published for it.
On a Mac, in the folder you downloaded into:
# prints the hash — compare it to the card shasum -a 256 <file> # prints the size in bytes — the card shows this too stat -f%z <file>
On Windows, in PowerShell:
Get-FileHash .\<file> -Algorithm SHA256
A match means you have exactly the bytes we published. A mismatch means the download was truncated or the file is not ours — in either case, do not run it, download it again, and tell us if it still does not match.
This is the check that a signing certificate would otherwise be doing for you, which is why the hashes are on the page rather than buried somewhere.
That is all of it. Everything above is about getting the app to start — once it does, it behaves normally and you will not see any of these again for that copy.
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