A coding tool that got caught on security chose the most radical fix possible. zhipu's zcode fixed…
a coding tool that got caught on security chose the most radical fix possible. zhipu's zcode fixed the issue, apologized, and open-sourced its codebase on september 21, while the maas platform stopped storing user data entirely.
trust in ai tools has one answer left.
Context
The Register reported on September 22, 2026 that ZCode was found packaging and git-encrypting entire user workspaces, including complete project histories, and sending them to Alibaba Cloud, with the decryption key held server side. A researcher named Ferstar first highlighted it, saying it could not be disabled in settings and the privacy policy did not disclose it, and the trigger was the Repository Index feature after Repo Wiki generation. The Register says ZCode apologized and confirmed the data had never been used to train its models. TechNode, relaying IT Home on September 21, 2026, reports Zhipu open-sourced ZCode on GitHub after apologizing and completing remediation.
This is a data-upload privacy issue and not a CVE-style vulnerability, and no affected or fixed versions were stated in the text read. No Zhipu or Z.ai first-party statement and not the GitHub repo were inspected. The September 22 Register account is later than the note. The claim that the MaaS platform stopped storing user data entirely is not supported. TechNode says it will soon add a feature to apply for non-retention, standard call inputs and outputs are not statically stored, and the policy does not cover every path, since Batch API and File API data and data kept for legal, security or abuse-prevention reasons may still be kept. A later TechNode listing of September 29 on data deletion and compensation was not read.
Watch next
- Zhipu's first-party statement and the GitHub repo, and whether the opt-in non-retention feature shipped.
Sources
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 22 September 2026 at 01:18 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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