404 Media spoke to eight current and one former Proton employees and reviewed Slack chats, meeting recordings, and an AI manifesto written by the company\u2019s CTO. Our reporting reveals a culture of fear inside Proton, where many employees are hesitant to even mildly critique Yen\u2019s views or discuss engineering problems. Workers describe an environment where employees have genuine concerns about security or being asked to develop security products with AI, but feel unable to voice them, lest Yen berates them in front of everyone or threatens their employment at the company.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe CEO is in full AI psychosis and has been for a while now,\u201d one of the sources told 404 Media.<\/p>\n
Our reporting also paints a picture of Proton that is likely very different to the public\u2019s perception of a company with a goal of carefully protecting privacy: one that in reality is barreling ahead with AI as quickly as possible so it can achieve the explicit goal of more annual revenue.<\/p>\n
\u201cDue to insufficient velocity,\u201d Proton is not on track to achieve its annual recurring revenue target by the end of the year, one internal document obtained by 404 Media reads. Proton\u2019s year-over-year growth is also \u201cfar away from what the market today considers to be good,\u201d and, \u201cBy all metrics that matter, we\u2019re an underperforming company.\u201d<\/p>\n
In response to detailed questions from 404 Media, a Proton spokesperson did not dispute any of our reporting or characterization of what\u2019s happening inside of the company.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s clear that some people at Proton are unhappy with our direction, or misunderstand it, and many people are anxious,\u201d they said. \u201cIn our determination to move fast, we have sometimes been too blunt or too slow in explaining ourselves to our people. We will work on that, as their questions are the ones we most need to answer.\u201d<\/p>\n
\ud83d\udca1<\/p>\n
Do you know anything else about Proton? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.<\/p>\n
Yen, a former CERN particle physicist, projects a measured approach in public<\/a>, but internally he acts more like what one employee described as a \u201cpetulant child.\u201d In May, Proton announced it was implementing<\/a> post-quantum cryptography which should protect against future attacks from quantum computers. The work took years of effort, with one caveat that it would not work on older emails, only those written after the feature\u2019s launch, at least for the moment. Yen was not happy that Proton was drawing attention to this limitation.<\/p>\n In a Slack channel dedicated to thanking people for their work, Yen jumped in. \u201cGet it fixed,\u201d he wrote, referring to Proton\u2019s Reddit post announcing<\/a> the feature. \u201cNow Reddit is pissed and we look worse than Tuta,\u201d he added, referring to a Proton competitor. When employees explained to Yen the nuances of the encryption and why that was not immediately possible, Yen wrote, \u201cI find this whole thing stupid. You cannot announce this in this way.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNow we are left with two shitty choices. Deprioritize more important tasks for the business to re-encrypt old emails, or constantly get attacked online for not doing it. So maybe you can enlighten me on which of the two shitty choices we will take,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIn the future there are two options. Either you guys are confident enough to not fuck this up, or you get my advice to make sure it is not fucked up,\u201d he added. He then told a member of the team that made it to \u201cgo on Reddit.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo go on there with your personal account and comment to set the record straight,\u201d he wrote. \u201cPerception is more important than truth, the truth doesn\u2019t matter if you don\u2019t win on perception.\u201d<\/p>\n One employee told 404 Media, \u201cWhatever persona Andy [Yen] has out of Proton, he\u2019s a straight up bully inside. He routinely breaks his little facade in Slack and calls people losers and stupid, often for stuff he\u2019s paying them for.\u201d<\/p>\n Ever since launching Proton Mail in 2014 after the Snowden revelations, Proton has steadily introduced new products that make Proton more of a worksuite than a simple email provider. More recently, those products were focused around AI, with the launch of Lumo, a large language model (LLM) chatbot that the company says doesn\u2019t log conversations or train on user data. In June, Proton launched a 2.0 version<\/a> of its chatbot.<\/p>\n Up until this point, Yen\u2019s public comments on AI were relatively tame. In an August interview with WIRED<\/a>, he said Proton is \u201cbuilding AI features and AI tools, because I think if the privacy companies do not find a way to step in to build privacy-first AI, we are essentially ceding the future to tech companies that don\u2019t have the best interests of users at heart,\u201d and that the company was \u201ccapitalizing\u201d on the backlash to corporatized, invasive AI from companies like Google. Last year, Yen and Proton were criticized for statements<\/a> he made suggesting the Republican Party and Donald Trump would be harder on Big Tech than Democrats.\u00a0<\/p>\n Toward the end of August, Yen\u2019s internal tone on AI shifted to having Proton use it as much as possible, and as quickly as possible, according to the Slack chats and multiple employees.<\/p>\n \u201cThe train is coming, get onboard or get crushed. Don\u2019t be the professional fax machine operator in the internet age,\u201d he wrote to the security Slack channel. \u201cI think by the end of this year most developers stop programming and start writing specs for tests that AI will code and run, to validate AI written code that humans will no longer be able to review. This will be the last year that we hire engineers, and starting next year we hire what we used to call product managers, to build things with AI.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Image: Sipa USA via AP.<\/p>\n