On Friday, Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, cancelled a series of nearly company-wide ‘re-interviews’ that would have forced employees to explain how they are using AI, with the clear intention that they may be fired if not using it enough in the eyes of Proton leadership, according to six current Proton employees and audio of an around two hour all-hands meeting obtained by 404 Media.
The move came after 404 Media published an investigation on Thursday, which showed how Yen was aggressively pushing AI across Proton, in some cases despite security concerns from employees. In one exchange, an employee in the company’s security Slack channel urged Proton to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
The re-interview cancellations likely don’t address the concerns of many Proton users, who are more focused on Proton’s deprioritization of security; many Proton users have blasted the company’s leadership on social media over the last 24 hours and explicitly called for Yen to resign.
The investigation was based on conversations with eight current and one former Proton employees, Slack chats, meeting audio, and an AI manifesto written by the company’s CTO Bart Butler. It painted a picture of Proton that is very different to the public’s perception of a company carefully protecting privacy. Instead, Proton is barreling ahead with AI in large part to achieve more annual revenue. The investigation also found a culture of fear across Proton, where employees have genuine concerns about security or being asked to develop security-focused products with AI, but feel unable to voice them because Yen mocks or insults employees in front of everyone else.
“I don’t think he will change anything, and I think the only reason we had this meeting is because he has a rebellion on his hands,” one employee told 404 Media after the all-hands meeting on Friday.
Near the start of the meeting, Yen said, “I want to acknowledge myself, personally, that there was a communication failure on my part and there are many things that probably could and should have been communicated differently, and this is something that I’ll have to reflect on and improve over time. So I will do that.”
“So what does that mean going forward? Going forward, I'm still going to push,” he added.
Yen said leadership gathered in the last couple of days to talk about the re-interviews, and spoke to the Proton board too. “They’re closely monitoring the situation,” Yen said. (Proton is owned by the Proton Foundation, whose board of trustees includes Yen, Sir Tim Berners Lee, Prof. Carissa Veliz, Dingchao Lu, and Antonio Gambardella.)
After those discussions with leadership and the board, “We’ve decided to actually cancel the re-interviews,” Yen said. “Why? Well, I think actually in a, let’s say, unintentional way, they have actually already served their purpose.” As in, employees are now talking and learning about AI.
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Yen also mentioned “org changes,” and said that part of this is “redistributing talent across teams.” He said that the reorganization will happen next month, “but there will be no loss of jobs from AI.”
Later in the call, Butler said Yen “needs to, and he has committed to, doing better” regarding how he communicates with his employees. “Using AI effectively and pragmatically does not mean that we’ve given up on security, or good architecture, or sound software engineering principles,” he added.
“We fucked up, we know we fucked up,” Butler later said in response to an employee’s comments in the meeting.
“Your old job is gone,” Butler’s AI manifesto, posted to Slack, told engineers, 404 Media reported on Thursday. He wrote that not embracing AI posed an “existential threat to the success of the mission itself.”
Reactions to the re-interview cancellations were split across the Proton employees 404 Media spoke to. One said, “Some are happy as it’s progress. Others believe that this won’t change anything because there isn’t any consequence for Andy [Yen].” The employee added they “would have preferred real accountability from the leadership team.” They said they felt not much could have happened due to Yen having the majority of Proton’s shares.
Another employee said, after Proton canceled the re-interviews, “They said in the next breath they want to continue pushing AI and that the things that were to be measured in the re-interviews would become a component of the performance reviews.”
“They have said clearly the direction had not changed. As a Proton user that doesn’t reassure me,” the employee said. “As an employee, the re-interviews weren’t cancelled until this became public despite concerns raised by many of us. I think it goes beyond communication issues and growing pains.”
“Right now, everything seems consistent with it being damage control,” they said.
Another employee said they were “mostly happy with how this was addressed including by Andy [Yen].”
Proton did not respond to a request for comment.
After 404 Media published the investigation on Thursday, Yen took to Reddit. Users downvoted his response more than 1,200 times. Many Proton users on social media said they were cancelling their paid Proton plans.