They might be sending some user requests to Anthropic to gather trading data for their own models. If they do so, perhaps they need to add some tracer to request that they prefer to hide.
Everyone should distrust them equally. Only local agents in a detached network namespace are safe from data leaks. It is perfectly reasonable to assume they are using our sessions to train on, since everything else short of nuclear launch codes is already there, and they need to keep feeding it.
The request would need to be done from their service, so as not to expose the API key, and because it just makes sense. They could probably directly proxy it and Wireshark couldn't catch it, due to everything being HTTPS. But people could probably catch it by decompiling, so it would make more sense to have the server make the request as part of a GLM request. Not that I think this is plausible - I'm not sure.
Verbally minimising potential threats is not a valid approach to managing risk. We have seen mass misuse of tokens acquired through nefarious means to distill models and enhance training as a way of catching up recently, among other related issues. It is quite appropriate to wonder what else might be going on.
Chinese Communist party? it would be funny if China didn't have laws related to companies in China exfiltrating foreign data and giving it to the government for espionage purposes, z.ai is a chinese company, based in the capital Beijing. The likelihood that they work with the government hand in glove is pretty high. I wouldn't run that binary on any machine I was doing anything serious with. If you ran it on a corporate network, I would hope security escorts you out of the building.
snowden's book, "Permanent Record" talks about the mass surveillance that he released in 2013. it makes no mention of AI companies sending data to the government. unless you can quote the exact language you're talking about in the book, I call BS on that.
secondly, you're claiming that it is the same in the US. there is no laws in the US requiring private companies to exfiltrate data and send it to the government en masse, like there is in China. these laws just don't exist, and if they did exist they would be ruled unconstitutional in violation of the Fourth amendment. As a matter of fact, last week Supreme Court decision in Chatrie v. United States came out on Monday, June 29, 2026 that affirmed that general warrants are a violation of the Fourth amendment, related to sweeping geofence warrants. so what you're talking about just does not exist. Yeah, I'm sure some companies, like Facebook, Google, etc have private agreements with government agencies to release data privately, these rules eventually are a violation of the Fourth amendment without a warrant.
to avoid any of this, I use open models with small providers that are very unlikely to be having private agreements with government agencies specifically to avoid that conflict. it's up to you to protect your own privacy. but to claim that the US government is doing this with AI companies, it's just flat wrong.
> "Permanent Record" talks about the mass surveillance that he released in 2013. it makes no mention of AI companies sending data to the government. unless you can quote the exact language you're talking about in the book, I call BS on that.
"Just after I arrived in Japan, Perot Systems was bought by Dell, the personal computer maker, which was trying to expand its business into IT support and corporate and government services. Overnight, my ID badges and paystubs changed, and I became a Dell employee. This meant that the US government was paying Dell for my services, and Dell was taking a cut of that money and passing the rest along to me."