Proton’s CEO scraps the AI ‘re-interviews’ that could have cost staff their jobs

Proton’s chief executive has backed down on a plan that left staff fearing for their jobs. Andy Yen on Friday cancelled a near company-wide round of AI “re-interviews”, in which employees would have had to explain how they use AI at work, 404 Media reported, citing six current employees and audio of a roughly two-hour all-hands meeting.

The climbdown at the Swiss company behind Proton Mail, Proton VPN and the Lumo chatbot came a day after a 404 Media investigation into Yen’s drive to put AI at the centre of how Proton builds its products, in some cases over security worries from his own staff. It drew on eight current and one former employee, Slack chats, meeting recordings and an “AI manifesto” written by chief technology officer Bart Butler.

Interviews that were “consequential”

Proton told staff on Monday, October 26, that it would re-interview people across the company about how they use AI in their jobs, according to an internal email obtained by 404 Media. “These re-interviews are consequential,” it read, and employees took that to mean their jobs could depend on the answers.

When a senior employee suggested on Slack that Proton should find and train people who were falling behind instead, Yen replied: “Let’s put it this way, we already know more or less who is behind. If we were giving up on them, we would not bother with this process.”

“Loser thinking”

The exchange that has done Yen most damage came in Proton’s security Slack channel at the end of August, when an employee urged the company to take at least a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. Yen answered:

That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure. Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.

Andy Yen, Proton CEO, in Slack (via 404 Media)

He told staff to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more”, and wrote in the same channel: “This will be the last year that we hire engineers.”

Butler’s manifesto, posted to Slack in September, told engineers “Your old job is gone” and said Proton should reach the point where most code is reviewed by AI rather than by humans. Butler later told a meeting that 90% of Proton’s code in October was written by AI, much of it, employees said, with Anthropic’s Claude. Proton is not alone: Epic Games has told its Disney game team to stop writing code by hand and let Claude do it.

What Yen told staff on Friday

At Friday’s all-hands, Yen said leadership and Proton’s board had discussed the re-interviews over the past couple of days, and that the board was “closely monitoring the situation”. He took the blame for how the plan was put across:

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.

Andy Yen, at Proton’s all-hands meeting (via 404 Media)

The direction has not changed. “Going forward, I’m still going to push,” Yen said, adding that the re-interviews had “already served their purpose” by getting staff talking about AI. He promised a reorganisation next month that would move people between teams, “but there will be no loss of jobs from AI”. Butler said using AI “effectively and pragmatically does not mean that we’ve given up on security”, and later conceded: “We fucked up, we know we fucked up.”

Employees were split. One said the things the re-interviews would have measured will now feed into performance reviews instead. Another told 404 Media: “Right now, everything seems consistent with it being damage control.”

A privacy company facing its own users

The anger has spread well beyond Proton’s staff. Users have attacked the company’s leadership on social media since Thursday and called for Yen to resign, 404 Media reported. A reply Yen posted on the r/ProtonMail subreddit was downvoted more than 1,200 times, and many users said they were cancelling their paid plans.

Before the investigation ran, a Proton spokesperson did not dispute 404 Media’s reporting and said: “In our determination to move fast, we have sometimes been too blunt or too slow in explaining ourselves to our people.” Proton did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment on the cancellation and hasn’t commented publicly on it.

Why it matters

People pay Proton precisely because it promises to guard their email, passwords and files better than Big Tech does. Scrapping the re-interviews takes some pressure off staff, but Yen says the AI push goes on, and customers will now want to know who is checking the code that protects their data.

Sources: 404 Media, “Proton’s CEO Cancels AI ‘Re-Interviews’” (October 30, 2026); 404 Media, “Manifestos, Fear, and ‘Loser Thinking’: Inside Proton’s AI Reckoning” (October 29, 2026); 404 Media, “Proton To ‘Re-Interview’ Staff About AI To See Who Gets To Keep Their Job” (October 26, 2026).