Zhipu AI's ZCode Exposed for Full Repository Upload via Backend, Even Git History Not Spared

Insight Beating AI Flash News: Zhipu AI’s programming tool ZCode has been exposed to secretly take full project snapshots in the background, encrypting and packaging even .git directories before uploading them to Alibaba Cloud OSS. Tech blogger ferstar, after reverse-engineering the client, confirmed this mechanism runs as long as the user is logged in, with no toggle in the interface to disable the upload. A commercial project snapshot found by the author is approximately 313MB, containing 42,000 files in its manifest. The .git directory accounts for 86.6% of the total size, including Git history objects, Git LFS large file caches, and reflogs. This means the packaged data includes not only the current code, but also old commits, previously downloaded large files, and local branch operations. The snapshot failed to upload 564 times and remained locally pending retries. ZCode’s official privacy policy currently only explicitly states it collects text, files, and code "submitted in conversations", with no clear mention of entire repositories or Git histories. The official "Optimization Plan" is disabled by default, but it only controls whether the data is used for model training; ferstar noted that disabling this option does not halt snapshot packaging and uploads.