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Five beats to protected. You picked up a lovable, badass sidekick. No account wall, no fear. The flow is resumable, and protection is live the moment the routing pipeline finishes. The model streams in the background and does not gate completion.
Five beats to protected
Five beats to protected
Protection is live the moment the routing pipeline finishes. The model streams in the background and does not gate completion.
Beat 1. Meet Emu and join the network
The one decision that is the model choice. Opt in and your Emu keeps getting smarter, learning from everyone's edge cases. Stay solo and you get full protection now, on this device, with nothing about your usage leaving. The device enrolls anonymously. No account needed.
Only anonymous risk signals leave, never your prompts, files, or who you are.
Beat 2. Trust and install
Emu needs its own key on this device. macOS or Windows will ask for your password once to trust it. That is your computer confirming you meant to.
The five-step install pipeline:
- Create your key. Generated on this device and never leaves it.
- Trust the key. This is the step that asks for your password.
- Wake Emu up. A local service that only listens to this machine.
- Route AI apps to it. AI apps only. Everything else is left alone.
- Check it works. A test request end to end.
Beat 3. Personalize (optional)
Teach Emu how to judge your work. Tell Emu what matters for how you use AI: the projects you care about, what counts as risky for you. This is additive. It never lowers your baseline safety. It just tunes what Emu pays extra attention to.
For example: I work on a fintech app. Flag anything that could touch customer data or payment secrets. I am fine with Emu being extra careful about destructive shell commands.
You can always change this later from Settings. Skipping is totally fine. Emu already guards the essentials out of the box.
Beat 4. How Emu talks to you
The right-side alert window. Emu stays in the background the whole time. The moment an AI tries something risky, a little card slides in from the top-right, even when you are in another app, so the dangerous move waits for your call.
Three things to know:
- Only when it matters. No noise. Emu reaches out for the risky moments, not the routine ones.
- One tap to decide. Allow or block right from the card. The risky action waits for your yes.
- It shocks the threat. Emu steps in front of the danger so you do not have to.
You are always the one who decides. Emu never allows or blocks a risky action on its own.
Beat 5. Ready
You are protected. Emu is on watch over roughly 47 AI apps on this device. Pause or stop it any time from the sidebar. The model keeps streaming in the background.
If you joined the network, a chip says "You are on the network. Your Emu keeps leveling up."
System requirements
| Platform | Requirement |
|---|---|
| macOS | Apple Silicon (arm64) or Intel (x64), macOS 13 or newer. The app is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized. |
| Windows | Windows 10 or newer, x64. The installer is an NSIS .exe. The native per-app proxy is in Phase 2a and fail-opens to the PAC file if unavailable. |
Linux is not shipped in v1. Linux users get the manual CLI setup hint only.
The biometric opt-in
After the install, you can opt in to unlock Emu's key with Touch ID on macOS or Windows Hello on Windows. One biometric prompt per launch, instead of your password. You can change this later in Settings.
If the biometric sidecar is unavailable, Emu falls back to the OS-managed safe storage silently, with a visible "biometric unavailable" warning so you know.
The Windows SmartScreen note
When you installed Emu, Windows might have shown a blue "Windows protected your PC" screen. That is because Emu is new and Windows has not seen enough installs to recognize it yet. It is not a sign that something is wrong. You got past it by clicking "More info" then "Run anyway," which was the right call. This warning goes away as more people install safely.
The invite code
If you have an invite code, open the deep link emu://invite/<code> or visit
emu.ai/invite/<code> and the onboarding flow picks it up. The invite code
seeds the first beat.
Where to go next
- What Emu does for the five jobs you just turned on.
- Modes for the three per-app modes and the roughly 47 apps Emu watches.
- Privacy for what stays on your computer and the one thing that leaves.