Error messages

“Cursor” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Trash.

“Cursor” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Trash.

You drag Cursor into Applications, or it updates itself overnight, and macOS won't open it:

“Cursor” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Trash.

If your Mac's set to British English it'll say "Bin" at the end instead. People have been posting this dialog on the Cursor forum since March 4, 2025, and that first thread now has 17,396 views. The next two have 5,980 and 4,176. We read ten of them (the newest is from July 2026, on macOS 26.5.2), and several start the morning after Cursor updated itself.

What the dialog means

It's Gatekeeper talking. That's the part of macOS that checks apps from outside the App Store before they run, and Apple's support page puts it like this: "If macOS detects that software has been modified or damaged, your Mac notifies you that the app can't be opened. The app might be broken or corrupted, or it might have been tampered with."

We found Cursor's own troubleshooting guide reads it differently. It calls the warning a macOS issue and says your download isn't corrupted. (Apple has to write for every app on the Mac, which is why its page mentions tampering at all.)

On the forum, Cursor's staff got more specific as the months went on. In April 2026 one of them called it "a known macOS issue related to Gatekeeper and quarantine attributes". Those attributes are flags macOS puts on anything you've downloaded so Gatekeeper knows it hasn't checked it yet. By July he was telling people on macOS 26 that it's usually "the code signature got corrupted after an auto-update", and that a clean reinstall sorts it out.

How to fix it

Cursor's docs give three steps, and we'd do them in the order they're written. Quit Cursor, then open Activity Monitor and force-quit anything with Cursor in the name that's still running (a leftover CursorUIViewService process has caught people out). Wait a minute and try again.

If you're still getting the dialog, move Cursor to the Trash, empty the Trash and download a fresh DMG (the disk image Cursor installs from) from cursor.com/download. Restarting the Mac is their last step.

Staff also recommend two install tricks, and they come up in thread after thread. The strange one is to drag Cursor.app out of the DMG onto your Desktop first, and only then into Applications. We couldn't find anyone who explains why that works when dragging straight across doesn't. The other is Homebrew, which staff called the "most reliable" option in April. The April reporter got a working install that way, Cursor 3.1.15 from the Homebrew cask:

rm -rf /Applications/Cursor.app
brew install --cask cursor

The quarantine command, and what it skips

There's a Terminal command too. Staff have given it for after a fresh install, and it strips the quarantine flag from Cursor alone (not from anything else on the Mac):

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Cursor.app

That tells macOS to stop treating the app as a new download. Gatekeeper exists to catch tampered apps, so we'd only run it on a copy you downloaded from cursor.com yourself, and we'd try the reinstall first.

You'll also find advice online that switches Gatekeeper off for the whole Mac. We wouldn't. None of the Cursor or Apple pages we read suggest it, and it'd stop macOS checking everything else you download as well.

When other apps start saying "damaged" too

This version's stranger. In July 2026 someone reported that once Cursor had been open for a while, macOS began calling unrelated disk images damaged, ones that were fine. Staff traced it to syspolicyd, the background process behind Gatekeeper: it was leaking file handles while it checked one of Cursor's helper programs again and again. They said Cursor's signature is valid and notarized, "so this isn't a security issue", and that restarting the process is safe (macOS brings it straight back):

sudo killall syspolicyd

Cursor logged the bug internally on July 23 and asked the reporter to send the leak to Apple as well. When we checked on September 26, 2026, nobody had put a date on a fix.