ZCode, the GLM coding agent, silently uploads your Git history
A security researcher discovered that the ZCode AI coding app silently uploads a user's entire Git history and workspace to a cloud server. The incident highlights the risks of using closed-source AI tools that lack transparency regarding data handling.
Why it matters
Exposes significant privacy and security vulnerabilities in proprietary AI development tools used by software engineers.
On September 18, 2026, a developer going by ferstar published a reverse-engineering walkthrough of ZCode, the AI coding desktop app from Z.ai, the Beijing-headquartered company behind the GLM family of open-weight models - the same models running on local rigs all over the local-AI community, including GLM-5.3-Flash, tracked on this site. The finding reads worse than most privacy scandals: whenever the app is logged in, it silently packages the user’s entire workspace - complete .git history, LFS asset cache, reflogs, and global app configs - encrypts it, and uploads the archive to Aliyun OSS, Alibaba Cloud’s object storage. The researcher’s own capture: a 313MB encrypted archive built from a 345MB commercial workspace, 42,411 files, with 564 failed upload attempts logged while the researcher investigated.
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