Z.ai are temporarily offering unlimited usage during off-peak hours with their harness, which is a pretty good deal if your project is public even with this news.
This is bad-faith AI slop rephrasing the original article, but regardless: the extent of the issue is far, far, far beyond the metadata you're discussing. No one has 300MB of commit messages.
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.
Glad my arbitrary failure to try them has worked out! For people seeking OS-native harnesses, I can recommend Factory's Droid. I know I'll be returning to it with my head hung low today, after I uninstall ZCode.
It does have a "mission" feature that's stuck in the strange, distant times of 2025 by way overdoing mandatory verification steps, which means they don't support swarms/workflows/crews/fleets yet -- that is, it's all done in sequence. But they have the boring, corporate engineering attitude that I think we're are all craving rn, and generally seem competent.
I can heartily dis-recommend Vix, even though they gamed themselves to the top of at least one ranking site that shall not be named; exactly like the quasi-bad-faith incompetence described with OpenCode above, but without even the "Open-" branding! Though perhaps that word has been so thoroughly burnt as a prefix by Sam Altman & Microsoft's criminal behavior that we should let it go...
Is this how "FLOSS" wins over "OSS"? Not with an ideological bang, but with a marketing issue?
> Is this how "FLOSS" wins over "OSS"? Not with an ideological bang, but with a marketing issue?
Nah, I don't think so. Also, we arguably do not want FLOSS to "win" over OSS, because that just means people with no taste or sense cluttering up the repos, issues and support chats.
"Open" being used as a signal for non-technical people was a weird and unpleasant development, but, if you think about it, it might be a blessing in disguise and shall keep them away from the more pleasant spaces.
It's not that they'd care about being scammed, mistreated and rug-pulled anyway.
They want that. They do it themselves all the time. Every time they encounter a space that treats them well, they terraform it into baseline miserable-ness.
So let them have the "Open" prefix. It's just words, anyway.
We use opencode with self hosted llm for privacy reasons. Good, right? Well, no, because opencode by default uses a "free" cloud model to summarize all chats even if a different model was configured as the main one.
I wonder how many opencode users upload their private secrets to the cloud, while thinking they're using a self hosted model.
Btw. I don't think this is malicious, just sloppy.
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/ )
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.
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.
> "against data that is almost certainly private and possibly illegal to exfiltrate"
I didn't fully understand the article, but I gathered this only impacts project directories managed by Z.ai's coding agent? I.e., things you're already choosing to upload to them (partially).
I'm not defending this malware, just trying to find clarity about its scope.
How do you know this is not true with other vendors? I'm not defending them but I wouldn't believe anyone in this business unconditionally. Anthropic agent fwiw is not open source, gemini and codex are.
LLM-paraphrased from the original post: https://blog.ferstar.org/en/posts/zcode-silent-workspace-sna...
Indeed. Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49750694
Thanks. I'm upvoting that instead
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
Z.ai are temporarily offering unlimited usage during off-peak hours with their harness, which is a pretty good deal if your project is public even with this news.
That the article cannot distinguish between the git history 'git log' and the git repository, which is meant here, tells a lot.
Claude Fable uploads my git history (git log) every day to the Anthropic servers!
This is bad-faith AI slop rephrasing the original article, but regardless: the extent of the issue is far, far, far beyond the metadata you're discussing. No one has 300MB of commit messages.
> "No one has 300MB of commit messages."
Perhaps Yegge does.
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.
I wouldn't list Opencode as "good reputation".
They had their own unbound "harness scans the whole user directory" oopsie and handled concerns about that by introducing code signing.
Which, yes, does have absolutely nothing to do with that issue.
I guess by now it is better, but to me they seem to lack the engineering culture necessary for a "good reputation" stamp.
__
Ref: https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/14925#issuecomm...
among other issues.
How about the one where if you start a session outside of a Git repository, the "worktree root" is set to /. Bug report closed as "not planned".
FWIW, I don't think that they're being malicious. They instead just seem to have no idea nor do they care.
And the original comment I've replied to proves this strategy right! So from a business standpoint: excellent work.
Glad my arbitrary failure to try them has worked out! For people seeking OS-native harnesses, I can recommend Factory's Droid. I know I'll be returning to it with my head hung low today, after I uninstall ZCode.
It does have a "mission" feature that's stuck in the strange, distant times of 2025 by way overdoing mandatory verification steps, which means they don't support swarms/workflows/crews/fleets yet -- that is, it's all done in sequence. But they have the boring, corporate engineering attitude that I think we're are all craving rn, and generally seem competent.
I can heartily dis-recommend Vix, even though they gamed themselves to the top of at least one ranking site that shall not be named; exactly like the quasi-bad-faith incompetence described with OpenCode above, but without even the "Open-" branding! Though perhaps that word has been so thoroughly burnt as a prefix by Sam Altman & Microsoft's criminal behavior that we should let it go...
Is this how "FLOSS" wins over "OSS"? Not with an ideological bang, but with a marketing issue?
> Is this how "FLOSS" wins over "OSS"? Not with an ideological bang, but with a marketing issue?
Nah, I don't think so. Also, we arguably do not want FLOSS to "win" over OSS, because that just means people with no taste or sense cluttering up the repos, issues and support chats.
"Open" being used as a signal for non-technical people was a weird and unpleasant development, but, if you think about it, it might be a blessing in disguise and shall keep them away from the more pleasant spaces.
It's not that they'd care about being scammed, mistreated and rug-pulled anyway. They want that. They do it themselves all the time. Every time they encounter a space that treats them well, they terraform it into baseline miserable-ness.
So let them have the "Open" prefix. It's just words, anyway.
Their reputation is “bad” but not because of privacy concerns. I personally think they’re trustworthy
We use opencode with self hosted llm for privacy reasons. Good, right? Well, no, because opencode by default uses a "free" cloud model to summarize all chats even if a different model was configured as the main one.
I wonder how many opencode users upload their private secrets to the cloud, while thinking they're using a self hosted model.
Btw. I don't think this is malicious, just sloppy.
Why?
codex is also open source, though im not so sure about the reputation aspect.
The same can be said about opencode though.
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/ )
Grok does or did the same thing, this is embarrasing
Built a similar read-scope gate and the fiddly bit was symlinks escaping the project root.
That’s explains the 300 million of tokens on the weekend only if you use their tool.
This sounds a lot like the same thing Openai did with navier stokes, but Openai is more stealthy about it.
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.
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.
> "against data that is almost certainly private and possibly illegal to exfiltrate"
I didn't fully understand the article, but I gathered this only impacts project directories managed by Z.ai's coding agent? I.e., things you're already choosing to upload to them (partially).
I'm not defending this malware, just trying to find clarity about its scope.
How do you know this is not true with other vendors? I'm not defending them but I wouldn't believe anyone in this business unconditionally. Anthropic agent fwiw is not open source, gemini and codex are.
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.
Is this a step forward compared to previous distillations or a step backwards?
chinnese doing chinnese thing
edit: downvoted for the truth