In an ideal world for Google, people who want to download YouTube videos for offline viewing would subscribe to YouTube Premium to access that feature. Unfortunately for the tech giant, there are several tools people can use to download YouTube videos without a Premium subscription and bypass the advertisements that would otherwise be served when watched online.

yt-dlp, a command-line audio and video downloader for YouTube, is one of those utilities. According to Hacker News, some Chrome users are beginning to notice that attempts to download yt-dlp in the browser are being blocked and marked as "suspicious," but the truth is more than likely less malicious.

It's unclear why the browser is labeling yt-dlp downloads like this

Don't reach for your pitchfork yet

I tried downloading yt-dlp, and not only was I warned about the app, but Chrome displayed a second pop-up asking me to enable enhanced protection after it "just blocked a dangerous file from downloading."

For some, this move rings alarm bells. Google ideally doesn't want people downloading YouTube videos onto their devices, and as such, tools like yt-dlp are against its best interests. The theory is that Google has marked yt-dlp as suspicious in an effort to prevent people from downloading the app and using it to download YouTube videos.

However, there's a huge chance that yt-dlp was just marked as a false positive. Posters in the Hacker News thread noted that Firefox also treated the file with suspicion because "this file is not commonly downloaded." Likewise, others point out that the binaries used by yt-dlp are compiled by PyInstaller, which often trigger false positives in antivirus software. I wasn't able to reproduce the same warning in Firefox, despite some users in the Hacker News thread reporting they also encountered the issue with the browser.

It's impossible to say for sure whether this is Google deliberately blocking the app or just a false positive. Personally, given that Firefox is reportedly showing similar warnings, I'm heavily leaning toward the latter. There's a very good chance something about yt-dlp's files or download count is triggering a "better safe than sorry" mechanism that blocks the download. XDA has reached out to Google for comment.

Have you run into this issue with yt-dlp and Chrome? Let us know in the comments below.