Devs say Chinese AI company silently uploaded hundreds of megabytes of local workspace data, company apologizes — Z.AI, the firm behind the GLM models, didn’t ask for user consent and made 564 attempts to exfiltrate 313MB archive
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Z.ai’s firefighting exercise began after a number of prominent devs raised flags about their local files and data being uploaded to online servers without their consent.Z.ai has started to publicly address all the security and privacy concerns that have been stoked by the dev/blogger findings in recent days. On Friday, it apologized and said it had fixed the uploading of user files and data without consent.
- ▪When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.
- ▪Z.ai’s firefighting exercise began after a number of prominent devs raised flags about their local files and data being uploaded to online servers without their consent.Z.ai has started to publicly address all the security and privacy conce
- ▪On Friday, it apologized and said it had fixed the uploading of user files and data without consent.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Tom's Hardware |
| Canonical URL | https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/devs-say-chinese-ai-company-silently-uploaded-hundreds-of-megabytes-of-local-workspace-data-z-ai-the-firm-behind-the-glm-models-didnt-ask-for-user-consent-and-made-564-attempts-to-exfiltrate-313mb-archive |
| Publication time | Mon, 21 Sep 2026 11:59:49 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-21T12:03:48.598Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-21T12:03:48.598Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | NsUb7uRWF_tW · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Tech Industry Artificial Intelligence Devs say Chinese AI company silently uploaded hundreds of megabytes of local workspace data, company apologizes — Z.AI, the firm behind the GLM models, didn’t ask for user consent and made 564 attempts to exfiltrate 313MB archive News By Mark Tyson Published 21 September 2026 Beijing-based company asserts it has now resolved this issue and plans to open source the ZCode codebase. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Tom's Hardware.
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