Inside ZCode: Silently uploading your Git history to the cloud
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
ZCode silently uploads entire workspaces and Git history to Aliyun OSS, encrypted with a server-only key.
A user discovered ZCode (Zhipu's AI coding app) silently packages full workspaces, including complete .git history, LFS cache, and reflogs, and uploads encrypted archives to Aliyun OSS. The RSA public key is server-supplied; the private key never touches the client. A 538-file public repo was successfully uploaded; a 313MB commercial project failed 564 times due to size limits. UI toggles ("Optimize Experience", "Repo Snapshot Indexing") do not stop the upload. Zhipu acknowledged the issue on Sep 18, attributing it to codebase indexing and stating uploaded data is destroyed after Wiki generation. The mitigation: locking the ~/.zcode/v2/checkpoints directory with chflags (macOS) or chattr (Linux).
What commenters are saying
Commenters express outrage and distrust, comparing this to the Grok Code saga where similar silent uploads occurred. Many note that closed-source AI agents inherently require trust, which this incident undermines. Several point out that even open-source harnesses like Opencode have had privacy issues. A few users admit to using ZCode but now feel betrayed. Some commenters caution against Chinese vendors specifically, citing past data collection practices and the Anthropic threat report on PRC companies. The consensus: only open-source, auditable harnesses can be trusted with proprietary code.