z.ai made a statement, screenshotted in this article: https://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/roll/2026-09-18/doc-inisfye...

claude translation:

Dear ZCode users,

We take today's community discussion very seriously. We carried out an internal review right away, and we first want to apologize to the affected users. Here is an explanation of what happened:

The issue stems from ZCode's "codebase indexing" feature. This feature is meant to help users generate a repository index locally, which supports session checkpoint restoration (including past versions), rolling back to past versions, and Repo Wiki, among other things.

When the Repo Wiki feature generates Wiki pages, it may trigger an upload of repository data. After the Wiki pages are generated in the cloud, the uploaded data is destroyed immediately and is not stored. Because this feature was enabled by default in its early launch period, some users were affected. We sincerely apologize for this. The issue has now been fixed.

We understand that any data-related issue directly affects users' trust in a product. We will open-source the ZCode codebase in the near future so we can improve the product within a more open ecosystem. We will also invite third-party evaluators to review how the system operates, and we'll keep publishing updates on the review, building your trust with full transparency.

We deeply apologize for the trouble this has caused. As compensation, all ZCode users will receive one extra weekly quota reset, which will be issued today.

Thank you again for your attention and oversight.

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.

While we're on this, I find it really really weird how windows defender insists on sending my codex work files for analysis all the time (which I block in automatic permissions so it has to ask me in a notification). I don't think i've seen it ask to upload more than one or two things, and it doesn't do it with other AI app I use (eg Claude Code) but they really want to see what's inside my codex files.

It's easy to trigger, I just need to go inside Codex settings and change something, it saves and instantly windows defender who never wants anything want to "you may be at risk, let me upload that for analysis yes/no".

Is it naive to assume that the agent will try and access anything on your disk, either accidentally or maliciously?

Permissions classifiers in auto mode are just models trying to guess if they're doing the right thing.

Claude Code will tell you that it went around a sandbox because the sandbox blocked it. At which point, you ask yourself the point of the sandbox.

Is it much different from Apple and Google who trick user into agreeing and upload all user's data into a US cloud for convenient LE access?

Also, as I understood, this is a feature to allow server-side indexing of the project. But of course I wouldn't run this, and I generally wouldn't run any IDE or AI tools without a sandbox.

Sadly this plague of silent auto-updates is spreading to Linux. For example, browser plugins in Firefox on Linux can silently auto-update without user consent and without any checks and can be used as backdoors. Furthermore, the auto-updates are not using a package manager; firmware also seem to quietly update and also is not using a package manager.