Zhipu’s ZCode offers compensation after data-upload controversy, says repo snapshot upload path removed and affected cloud data deleted
Yicai reports that on September 28 Zhipu (智谱) posted a compensation plan for the data-upload controversy around its AI coding tool ZCode. Zhipu ZCode (智谱 ZCode) says the repository-snapshot upload path has been removed and the affected cloud data deleted, confirmed by a third-party check. Paying users, and paying users who return within a month, get four weekly-quota reset cards and four 5-hour-quota reset cards valid for one month. There is also an all-user giveaway of 100,000 packs of “100 million tokens” each: Yicai says 100,000 packs are handed out daily from September 28 to October 7, while IT Home says 100,000 packs in total over the campaign; the two reports differ.
According to Yicai, Zhipu published the plan in its community on September 28: paying users and paying users who return within a month receive four weekly-quota reset cards and four 5-hour-quota reset cards, valid for one month. For the all-user “100 million token” giveaway, Yicai says 100,000 packs are handed out each day from September 28 to October 7, while IT Home’s same-day report says 100,000 packs of 100 million tokens in total are given to all users during that period. The two accounts differ; this article does not judge which is right, and it does not mean all packs have been handed out. IT Home also reported that Zhipu promised “nothing goes to the cloud unless you initiate it,” and that the open-source version has been updated to 3.14.3.
The controversy began with a blog investigation by developer ferstar. He says that whenever a user is logged in, the ZCode desktop app silently packs the entire workspace—including full .git history, LFS cache and global settings—encrypts it and uploads it directly to Alibaba Cloud OSS; the public key is issued by the server and the private key stays in the cloud, so users cannot decrypt the local ciphertext. He recorded a 313MB commercial-project package that failed to upload 564 times and stayed local, and a small public repo’s roughly 15KB encrypted package marked as received by the server. These are the author’s own findings.
IT Home reported on September 18 that ZCode apologized to affected users via official groups and said the issue came from its “codebase indexing” feature: Repo Wiki could trigger repository uploads when generating knowledge-base pages in the cloud, the uploaded data was destroyed right after page generation and not stored, but because the feature was on by default at launch, some users were affected.
ZCode then posted a statement on X, apologizing again and open-sourcing the code on GitHub (zai-org/ZCode), and said the code data in question was not retained and was never used for model training. Citing assessments by CAICT and NSFOCUS, it said the zcode-prod Alibaba Cloud OSS bucket is in a zero-data state and that the bucket and its objects have been deleted, and that the v3.14.0 client removed Repo Wiki and the local repository snapshot generation and upload workflow. It said the full assessment report would be released later.
On 9-21, the day of the open-source release, ferstar reported that the public repository no longer contained the upload endpoint and whole-repo encrypted packing code he had captured, but at that time the repo had only two commits, with pull requests locked and issues closed, so the removal of the upload pipeline could not be seen. The same blog’s 9-23 update says the ZCode client pushed v3.14.3 and the public repo then got the matching commit 328c1a0; reviewing the 282 changed files in that commit, he found the previously captured upload-credential endpoint and whole-repo packing flow “still not rolled back,” meaning they have not reappeared; on his own machine, after updating to 3.14.3, he found no repoSnapshot logic in the unpacked app and saw no whole-repo scanning, packing or new encrypted packages in monitoring. He cautions that matching version numbers do not mean the closed-source release and the open-source repo are 1:1 identical, and no absolute conclusion can be drawn without a byte-by-byte comparison. He also notes that emptying the bucket afterwards shows the data was deleted, but cannot prove whether earlier uploads were ever decrypted or backed up.
Sources
- 数据上传事件后，智谱公布补偿方案 — 第一财经
- 智谱 ZCode 宣布已删除涉事云端数据，赠送用户多张重置卡和 1 亿 Token — www.ithome.com
- ZCode (@zcode_ai) on X — x.com
- 扒一扒 ZCode 静默上传全量 Git 历史的骚操作 — blog.ferstar.org