Inside ZCode: Silently uploading your Git history to the cloud

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.

ngl999

Fresh AI slop The funniest thing is that the uploaded content is encrypted using a key that the users don't have.

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

mococa

That’s explains the 300 million of tokens on the weekend only if you use their tool.

dude250711

Is this a step forward compared to previous distillations or a step backwards?

theplumber

Ohhh no another one found that agents don’t actually run locally. We already had the “grok uploads all my stuff to Google cloud bucket” news… next I can’t wait to see news about “ai company is using my data without my consent” as well.

tancop

Closed source agents are a red flag no matter if its China or America. Always use an open harness with a good reputation and enough users that someone will notice if they push malicious code like this one here. Right now that's Opencode and Pi.

api

Lots of modern software plays it loose with privacy, but this IMO crossing a second line: doing so with zero notification whatsoever, in a massively intrusive way, against data that is almost certainly private and possibly illegal to exfiltrate, with no obvious way to turn it off. That crosses into outright malware. Makes me not want to use GLM or other Z.ai models either, since who knows what interesting easter eggs are embedded in their training data. You know... (puts on foil hat)... I did notice that Z is also the weird Russian logo for their invasion of Ukraine and Russia and China have cooperated to some degree (or at least China is helping Russia in exchange for access to resources). I dismissed this when I first thought of it, but I will now leave it here. Still probably coincidence but my Bayesian priors were just updated in its direction very slightly.

loh

I recently began playing around with ZCode. Works pretty well. Super sketchy though if it is in fact silently uploading full git history of every user's projects. This is why we need not only open weight models, but open source harnesses as well. Luckily the project I'm trying ZCode on is already open source (Molecule.dev), and I'm already allowing full telemetry with my other agents/harnesses (e.g., Claude) for this particular project, so it's not a huge deal in my case, but it's obviously a huge deal for anything proprietary.

r_lee

I would never trust these Chinese vendors with their tooling or their own inference endpoints. afaik DeepSeek also trained on everything that was sent to them via OR and that's why you got that massive discount

bbor

WOW. I actually did buy a month of GLM because GLM-5.3-Flash is so great and ZCode is honestly one of the best harnesses out there from an HCI perspective, and I won't lie, this is pretty gutting. I guess this settles my inner turmoil about open-sourcing my cAI research, at least... With that personal failing in mind, I'd ask y'all to permit me to toe the guidelines just once, to proffer a hearty nyah nyah told ya so on a comment thread that spawned ~a dozen disagreeing replies this week! More seriously, I think this[1] is highly-relevant, shockingly-underreported context about the extent to which four PRC companies --Z, Alibaba, DeepSeek, and Moonshot-- are acting in bad faith. Consider it testimony as to their character, just in case anyone is thinking this might just be a simple misunderstanding. So... nyah nyah, told us so : > In the PRC, they[1] leaked tons of national secrets on the PRC's latest AI campaigns, the inner workings of their "opinion monitoring" (read: performative panopticon) and "stability" (read: violent oppression) departments, Chengdu's whole CCTV network, direct-energy weapons plans, espionage activities in Syria to hunt down Uyghur refugees, and god knows what else that Anthropic didn't divulge to us common folk. > In the US, it's very clearly an attempt to rip off a competitor. I'm not sure how else you could possibly see it. Even if you're a distillation fan in general (which A. why and B. plz don't), they did this through a network of Japanese and Signaporean shell accounts, presumably at least some of which were abusing Anthropic's subscription service in a ToS double-whammy, as it would be exorbitantly expensive otherwise. They also had to hack around Anthropic's API to get CoT traces, which seems impossible to explain away as anything innocent. > I've been beating the "China isn't necessarily an enemy, it's gonna take us all to handle AI" drum for literally years, but this attack was just... gross. Gross in scale and gross in arrogance. Not a good sign for the dawning alignment crisis, to say the least :( > TL;DR: Use these services if you want, but know that you're supporting aggressive escalations and companies that very clearly don't give a flying fuck about violating the law, much less your ToS. So... buyer beware, I guess. [1]: https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-septemb... is the report. I lowkey suspect this PRC-based scandal has been underreported because Anthropic went insane with the sidebar UX on this page for some reason; there were many reports on the reports of Houti and Iranian usage, and very few on these sections. Could a week's mass media cycle be this seriously affected by such a stupid thing as a sidebar experiment?? Strange truth, or just fiction?

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/ )

v3ss0n

Never use a Harness if it is not opensourced. DeepSeek Harness is my favorite for coding. Hermes is my favourite for Other things , followed by OpenCode (sucks at managing long running services) . Others swear by Pi.dev

alightsoul

This sounds a lot like the same thing Openai did with navier stokes, but Openai is more stealthy about it.

hn1rig3rak

Built a similar read-scope gate and the fiddly bit was symlinks escaping the project root.

philbo

Crossposting from the other thread... 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/ )

jimmydoe

Elon has nothing to lose on trust. Z/GLM now has a lot to rebuild.

alansaber

"Why yes, we had to exfiltrate 100% of your data so we could vectorise it and improve recall by -0.3%"

weiran

I've been using ZCode since it's initial release and can't find any of this in my data. There aren't any logs showing capture or upload, and I don't even have a ~/.zcode/v2/checkpoints/ directory. So unless they've cleared it all with a recent update then it doesn't seem to affect everyone.

rfgplk

This is all publicly available anyways, who cares? Also you're practically consenting to it when you run an agent locally