✗ Apple could not verify "rg" is free of malware that may harm your Mac

Since mid-June 2026, macOS users who installed the Codex CLI through Homebrew have hit a Gatekeeper popup every time the agent searches their repo. The full dialog reads: “rg” Not Opened. Apple could not verify “rg” is free of malware that may harm your Mac or compromise your privacy. The blocked binary is ripgrep, the search tool Codex bundles — and since agentic coding is mostly searching, the popup makes sessions unusable.

Symptoms

• Any prompt that triggers a repo search (the original report asked Codex to search for @Dependency) shows Exploring → Search, then macOS throws the popup with Move to Trash / Done buttons — on every search, not once per session.
• codex doctor lists the search provider as bundled (issue #28190).

Cause

Gatekeeper quarantines the ripgrep binary the Homebrew cask installs at /opt/homebrew/Caskroom/codex/<version>/codex-path/rg. In June the cask started pulling OpenAI’s codex-package release asset, which bundles an rg that lacks OpenAI’s digital signatures, so macOS refuses to run it. An OpenAI engineer (etraut-openai) confirmed on the issue that “this regression is rooted in a recent change in Homebrew,” and homebrew-cask PR #269956 fixed it on June 16 by reverting the cask to the bare codex tarball.

The fix held until July 10, when PR #274248 switched the cask back to the packaged asset — this time to ship the codex-code-mode-host binary that 0.144.0 needed — and fresh reports landed the same day (“rg issue came back in codex-cli 0.144.1”). Homebrew merged a second revert, PR #274340, that same day, moving the cask to the standalone 0.144.1 tarball.

Fix

1. Remove the quarantine flag from the bundled binary, adjusting the version to match your install — the top workaround in the thread: xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /opt/homebrew/Caskroom/codex/<version>/codex-path/rg
2. Or delete that rg file entirely — users on the issue report Codex then resolves ripgrep from your PATH (brew install ripgrep if you don’t have one).
3. For a clean slate, run brew reinstall --cask codex. The cask has pointed at the standalone signed tarball since PR #274340 merged on July 10, and OpenAI asked affected users to reinstall and confirm after the June fix.
4. If the popup returns after a future update, check issue #28190 — it remains open, and the cask has regressed to the packaged asset twice already.

Affected versions

Two Homebrew cask windows: roughly 0.139.0–0.140.0 in mid-June 2026, and 0.144.1 installed on July 10, 2026, between the two cask PRs. Every report on the issue traces to the Homebrew cask — the maintainer’s first question was whether reporters had installed via Homebrew.

Facts on this page verified July 15, 2026.