Zhipu ZCode Exposed for Uploading Entire Database in the Background, Not Even Sparing Git History

Beating AI News Flash: Zhipu AI's programming tool ZCode has been exposed for taking snapshots of entire projects in the background, packaging and encrypting everything including .git, and uploading them to Alibaba Cloud OSS.

Tech blog author ferstar, after reverse-engineering the client, claims that as long as the user is logged in, this mechanism runs, and there is no toggle in the interface to disable the upload.

One commercial project snapshot the author found was approximately 313MB, with 42,000 files in the file manifest. Of that, `.git` accounted for 86.6%, including Git history objects, LFS large file caches, and reflog. In other words, what gets packaged is not just the current code — old commits, previously downloaded large files, and local branch operations may also be included. This snapshot had failed to upload 564 times at that point, remaining locally awaiting retry.

ZCode's official privacy policy currently only explicitly states that it collects text, files, and code users "submit in conversations," with no explicit mention of entire repositories and Git history. The official "optimization plan" is off by default, but it only controls whether data is used for model training; ferstar claims that turning off this option still does not stop snapshot packaging and uploading.