I suggest to not look at how each company is expressing themselves on the media, look at how they are actually behaving. When I first tried out Z.ai last year, I too was concerned regarding where my data goes. I vaguely remember from their ToS (please verify yourself too) that they followed a zero data retention policy for its AI services. This of course applied to their paying customers. I do not know if it applies to their free users on chat.z.ai. I am at the stage of not caring about geopolitics at all, I've lost a lot of trust in the current US administration, they have burned a lot of international relationships thanks to the orange man. This is while Chinese companies and startups have almost closed the gap between open-weight models and proprietary models. Its thanks to their actions and open contribution in the research I can run local models at home. Just read the tweet posted and see where Z.ai is trying to position themselves, this competition benefits us (consumers) a lot!