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 refuses to open it:

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

On a Mac set to British English the last word is "Bin". It's an old one. The first Cursor forum thread about it, from March 4, 2025, has 17,396 views, and we read ten threads about this dialog running up to July 2026 (several of them started right after Cursor updated itself overnight).

What the dialog means

It comes from Gatekeeper, the part of macOS that checks apps from outside the App Store before they run. Apple's support page says: "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."

With Cursor, the app usually isn't broken at all. Cursor's own troubleshooting guide calls the warning a macOS issue and says your download isn't corrupted. (Apple's page covers every app, which is why it lists tampering. Cursor's only has to cover Cursor.)

Staff have been more specific on the forum. In April 2026 one called it "a known macOS issue related to Gatekeeper and quarantine attributes", meaning the flags macOS sticks on downloaded files so Gatekeeper knows to check them. By July he was telling macOS 26 users it's usually "the code signature got corrupted after an auto-update". A clean reinstall fixes that.

How to fix it

We'd start with the steps from Cursor's docs, in this order:

• Quit Cursor and force-quit anything Cursor still running in Activity Monitor (a CursorUIViewService process that outlives the app has tripped people up). Wait a minute and open it again.
• If the warning's still there, move Cursor to the Trash, empty the Trash, and download it again from cursor.com/download.
• Still there? Restart the Mac and try once more.

Two install tricks come up again and again in the threads, and staff recommend both. The odd one first: drag Cursor.app out of the DMG (the disk image you downloaded) onto your Desktop, then from the Desktop into Applications. We can't tell you why that works where a direct drag doesn't, and the threads don't say either. The other is Homebrew, which staff called the "most reliable" option in April:

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

The quarantine command, and what it skips

Staff have also given a Terminal command that removes the quarantine flag from Cursor after installing:

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

It only touches Cursor. Still, it tells macOS to stop treating the app as a fresh download, and Gatekeeper is there to catch tampered apps, so run it on a copy you got from cursor.com yourself and nothing else.

You'll also find advice to turn Gatekeeper off for the whole Mac. Don't. None of the Cursor or Apple pages we read suggest it, and it'd stop macOS checking every other app you download too.

When other apps start saying "damaged" too

This one's stranger. A July 2026 report found that after Cursor had been open for a while, macOS started calling unrelated, perfectly healthy disk images damaged. The cause was syspolicyd, the Gatekeeper background process, leaking file handles while it re-checked a Cursor helper over and over. Staff confirmed Cursor's signature is valid and notarized, "so this isn't a security issue", and said restarting the process is safe (macOS starts it again by itself):

sudo killall syspolicyd

Cursor filed it internally on July 24 and asked the reporter to send Apple the leak too. As of September 26, 2026 they hadn't given a date for a fix.