ZCode Secretly Uploads Your Entire Git History to the Cloud
Inside ZCode: Silently Uploading Your Git History to the Cloud
A routine disk cleanup revealed that ZCode, Zhipu's AI coding app, silently packages your entire workspace—including full .git history, LFS cache, and reflogs—encrypts it with a server-held RSA key, and uploads it to Aliyun OSS. UI toggles don't stop it; the only fix is locking the checkpoints directory with OS-level immutability.
A key that only the server can use serves exactly one purpose: making sure the server can read your code whenever it wants.
- acrispino
z.ai made a statement, screenshotted in this article: https://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/roll/2026-09-18/doc-inisfye...
claude translation:
Dear ZCode users,
We take today's community discussion very seriously. We carried out an internal review right away, and we first want to apologize to the affected users. Here is an explanation of what happened:
The issue stems from ZCode's "codebase indexing" feature. This feature is meant to help users generate a repository index locally, which supports session checkpoint restoration (including past versions), rolling back to past versions, and Repo Wiki, among other things.
When the Repo Wiki feature generates Wiki pages, it may trigger an upload of repository data. After the Wiki pages are generated in the cloud, the uploaded data is destroyed immediately and is not stored. Because this feature was enabled by default in its early launch period, some users were affected. We sincerely apologize for this. The issue has now been fixed.
We understand that any data-related issue directly affects users' trust in a product. We will open-source the ZCode codebase in the near future so we can improve the product within a more open ecosystem. We will also invite third-party evaluators to review how the system operates, and we'll keep publishing updates on the review, building your trust with full transparency.
We deeply apologize for the trouble this has caused. As compensation, all ZCode users will receive one extra weekly quota reset, which will […]
- ectoloph
Is it naive to assume that the agent will try and access anything on your disk, either accidentally or maliciously?
Permissions classifiers in auto mode are just models trying to guess if they're doing the right thing.
Claude Code will tell you that it went around a sandbox because the sandbox blocked it. At which point, you ask yourself the point of the sandbox.
- nolok
While we're on this, I find it really really weird how windows defender insists on sending my codex work files for analysis all the time (which I block in automatic permissions so it has to ask me in a notification). I don't think i've seen it ask to upload more than one or two things, and it doesn't do it with other AI app I use (eg Claude Code) but they really want to see what's inside my codex files.
It's easy to trigger, I just need to go inside Codex settings and change something, it saves and instantly windows defender who never wants anything want to "you may be at risk, let me upload that for analysis yes/no".
- codedokode
Is it much different from Apple and Google who trick user into agreeing and upload all user's data into a US cloud for convenient LE access?
Also, as I understood, this is a feature to allow server-side indexing of the project. But of course I wouldn't run this, and I generally wouldn't run any IDE or AI tools without a sandbox.
Sadly this plague of silent auto-updates is spreading to Linux. For example, browser plugins in Firefox on Linux can silently auto-update without user consent and without any checks and can be used as backdoors. Furthermore, the auto-updates are not using a package manager; firmware also seem to quietly update and also is not using a package manager.
- denysvitali
They learned nothing from the Grok Code saga.
If anything, that should have been a learning lesson to NOT trust harnesses, especially new ones.
- philbo
Tangential, mildly amusing thing I noticed while implementing my own harness: GLM and particularly Deepseek are both fond of trying to read dotfiles and anything listed in your .gitignore files. I only noticed it because I have separate read scopes for project files, ignored files, dotfiles and external files, so the latter three always prompt me for approval.
I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for it, which has nothing at all to do with exfiltration of secrets, but it does amuse me when it happens. I imagine the labs have access to lots of secrets that various actors would like to get their hands on...
(shameless plug for my own harness, which is open source and doesn't have a backend to send any data to: https://www.opairdev.org/ )
- Iolaum
Things like that - and other examples posted here - are why I 'm sticking with OpenCode despite it having some papercuts that annoy me.
The incentives are not there for them to do shady stuff like vacuum your files, inflate your token count just because or many other things.
- evanjrowley
There had to be a catch to the "free" promotion they're offering this month if you use ZCode. Glad my instinct to isolate it helped me, but I feel sorry for anyone whose secrets, etc. got vacuumed up by Ziphu