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Abstract The scarcity of measured data for defect identification often challenges the development and certification of additive manufacturing processes. Knowledge transfer and sharing have become emerging solutions to small-data challenges in quality control to improve machine learning with limited data, but this strategy raises concerns regarding privacy protection. Existing zero-shot learning and federated learning methods are insufficient to represent, select, and mask data to share and control privacy loss quantification. This study integrates differential privacy in cybersecurity with federated learning to investigate sharing strategies of manufacturing defect ontology. The method first proposes using multilevel attributes masked by noise in defect ontology as the sharing data structure to characterize manufacturing defects. Information leaks due to the sharing of ontology branches and data are estimated by epsilon differential privacy (DP). Under federated learning, the proposed method optimizes sharing defect ontology and image data strategies to improve zero-shot defect classification given privacy budget limits. The proposed framework includes (1) developing a sharing strategy based on multilevel attributes in defect ontology with controllable privacy leaks, (2) optimizing joint decisions in differential privacy, zero-shot defect classification, and federated learning, and (3) developing a two-stage algorithm to solve the joint optimization, combining stochastic gradient descent search for classification models and an evolutionary algorithm for exploring data-sharing strategies. A case study on zero-shot learning of additive manufacturing defects demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method in data-sharing strategies, such as ontology sharing, defect classification, and cloud information use.