It’s rare to see an executive go from fucking around to finding out so quickly. That’s what happened last week when Proton CEO Andy Yen announced he was canceling a planned re-interview process for almost all current employees that would have checked if they’re using AI enough. This follows extreme backlash from Proton users and workers against the company's
aggressive pivot to AI
. It’s been a wild ride internally, several employees past and present have shared with 404 Media.
Photo by Sam Barnes/Web Summit via Sportsfile via Wikimedia Commons / Collage via 404 Media
Proton’s CEO Cancels AI ‘Re-Interviews’
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.
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