Protosentient AI™

Read this before you open anything (macOS)

These builds are ad-hoc signed. They are not signed by a registered Apple developer and they are not notarized — a settled decision, not a gap waiting to be filled. So macOS gets in your way twice, in this order.

1. Drag the app out of the disk image into Applications. Then eject the image. Then open it from Applications.

Do this first, and do it in the Finder. This is the step nobody knows about, and getting it wrong is invisible — the app opens perfectly well and then things go wrong later, in ways that look like faults in the app or in your account rather than in how you launched it.

1. Double-click the .dmg to open it (or unzip the .zip).
2. Drag the app onto the Applications folder. The disk images have an Applications shortcut sitting next to the app for exactly this.
3. Eject the disk image — the ⏏ beside its name in the Finder sidebar. If it came as a zip, put the unpacked folder in the Trash.
4. Open the app from Applications, not from the window it arrived in.

If you launch an app that was downloaded and is still sitting where it was unpacked, macOS does not run it from there. It copies it to a randomised, read-only temporary path and runs that copy instead — App Translocation. Three things follow, and none of them announce themselves:

• You are running the version inside that image, not the one in Applications. Open an old disk image you still have lying around and you get the old app, old bugs and all, while a newer copy sits installed and untouched.
• It cannot update itself. The copy it is running from is read-only, so the in-app updater has nowhere to write.
• It vanishes when you eject the image.

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.

2. Gatekeeper refuses it once

Anything you download from this page arrives with the quarantine mark a browser attaches, so macOS will refuse it the first time — every time, not sometimes. (A copy handed to you another way — off a share, AirDrop, scp — carries no mark and simply opens.) There are two dialogs, and which one you get depends on the app:

Nothing is damaged and your download is not corrupt. That second wording is what macOS says about an app built with a hardened runtime over an ad-hoc signature. ProtoSentient Platform and RAVNgraph are both built that way; KnowMonkey is not, which is the only reason it gets the milder dialog.

3. Getting past it

One command in Terminal clears the download mark. It works for both dialogs, and it is the only thing that works for the “is damaged” one. 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

The -r matters — an app is a folder, and the mark is on files inside it too. ProtoSentient Platform has a space in its name, so its path needs the quotes exactly as written. The command removes the mark; it does not change the app. Then launch it normally.

If you would rather not use Terminal, there is a click-only route — but only for the “unidentified developer” dialog, so in practice only for KnowMonkey. On macOS 15 (Sequoia) and later, including macOS 26:

1. Double-click the app. macOS refuses it. Click Done.
2. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security and scroll down to the line reading “…” was blocked to protect your Mac.
3. Click Open Anyway and confirm with Touch ID or your password. Every launch after that is normal.
4. macOS 14 or earlier only: right-click the app and choose Open, then Open again. Apple removed that shortcut in macOS 15, which is why it is not the first step.

Open Anyway never appears for the “is damaged” dialog. There is nothing on screen to click. Use the command above.

4. Apple Silicon or Intel

Only ProtoSentient Platform makes you choose; KnowMonkey and RAVNgraph ship one universal build that runs natively on both. Check under Apple menu → About This Mac: Apple Silicon says Chip: Apple M1/M2/M3/M4…, Intel says Processor: … Intel…. The cards below are labelled to match, and this page preselects the build it thinks fits your Mac.

An Intel-only build does run on an Apple Silicon Mac — under Rosetta, and macOS will put up a dialog offering to install Rosetta if it is not 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.

Only do any of this for a file you got from us and whose SHA-256 matches ours. Open Verify this file on the card to see the hash. That check is the reason the hashes are here.

Read this before you open anything (Windows)

Nothing we build carries an Authenticode certificate, and that is a settled decision rather than a gap waiting to be filled. Windows has no way to tell “unsigned” from “unknown”, so SmartScreen will warn about every file on this page.

1. “Windows protected your PC”

A blue box, and the only button on it says Don't run. There is no second button until you make one appear:

1. Click More info. It is a small text link in the body of the box, above the button — most people never find it, because it does not look like a control.
2. The box grows and names the app and its publisher. Publisher will say Unknown publisher. That is correct; there is no certificate to name one.
3. A second button appears: Run anyway.

Windows remembers that for that copy of that file, so you get it once rather than on every launch. Replace the file with a new build and you get it again.

2. If More info is not there

A downloaded file also carries a hidden marker saying it came from the internet, and on a machine with SmartScreen policy tightened that marker can remove the More info link entirely, leaving a box you genuinely cannot click past. Clear the marker instead: 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:

# confirm it is the file we published, then clear the marker
Get-FileHash .\<file> -Algorithm SHA256
Get-ChildItem -Recurse | Unblock-File

3. Installing

Both installers put the app in your own user account, so there is no administrator prompt and you do not need to be an admin on the machine.

ProtoSentient Platform is about 288 MB — the exact byte count is on its card. It takes a long time, and while it unpacks it sits there looking stalled. It has not hung. Leave it alone rather than starting it a second time. RAVNgraph is a tenth of the size and is quick.

Where a Windows build is not downloadable, its card says so and says why, rather than being left off the page.