Hey David,
Clink is a sort of “shell on steroids” replacement shell, and as a result of all the system-level features it must support (such as thread injection), is likely to get flagged as a virus in some cases. The author, Martin Ridgers, works (or at least did at one point) at Epic. That being said, the project hasn’t made a release from his repo since August 2024 (which is the version that ushell downloads). I found that someone has forked the repo and is actively working on their fork of it, and there are Github issues periodically about it being flagged by such and such virus scanner. The author made a very long and helpful reply about the nature of the software and why it gets flagged by AV software that you can read here: https://github.com/chrisant996/clink/issues/583\#issuecomment\-2024868016
I went ahead and scanned clink_x86.dll with VirusTotal, and indeed it is flagged by 11 scanners, BitDefender being one. Interestingly enough, though, a scan of clink_x64.dll is only flagged by a single scanner.
It’s above my pay grade to offer security advice, so I’ll have to leave it up to you on how you feel about trusting your AV software about this, however.