Proton goes all in on using AI
convo.casaNever mind the policy, why do tech CEOs have to sound like frat boys?
> “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.
What a jerk. I agree that security doesn't have to be given time—like all software, implementation takes the time it takes.
But he doesn't have to be such an asshole about it. In my book, there's nothing more representative of "loser thinking" than casting petulant aspersions like "loser thinking."
I don't believe there's more extreme loser thinking than betting it all on AI without a clear roadmap. Going nowhere fast like their ass is on fire.
I think for some businesses, it's reasonable to make hay while the sun shines.
Worse, is there really anything more indicative of "loser thinking" then adopting the exact same strategy as EVERY SINGLE POST on LinkedIn?
What a coincidence that all these fucking "thought leaders" have exactly the same thoughts.
Dunno, but it's a big reason why I hated living in SF, hate being lumped in with "tech bros", and absolutely cannot stand people who turn their entire personality into being "all in on AI".
I assume it's just the "get rich quick" mentality, and AI is where it's at for that.
Was same for crypto and NFT's and will be the same for the next thing
Not living in SF (or the US) and been around HN for a long time is an interesting view into how an influential part of the tech landscape thinks.
Because they’re all fraternity rejects who still want college boys to think they’re cool
That might have been an excuse in 1992. It's not an excuse in 2026. The geeks won. We are the cool guys (or were, until the fucking geek CEOs went insane).
Geeks got rich. We didn’t get cool. Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, et al have proven that money doesn’t make you happy, beloved, or cool (and actually seems to do the opposite).
> The geeks won.
Damn, my check must've gotten lost in the mail.
> The geeks won.
For a very brief period, and then when the really big money started rolling in, all the personalities that used to flock to wall street became programmers.
The Silicon Valley of the 90s was completely different to the thing it is now here.
So where computers and tech generally, when the motivation to do cool thing was the cool thing you got a very different crowd.
On one level it's a shame on another exactly what you'd expect to happen given the amounts of money involved.
We had it good there for a while.
The geeks won, and then were quickly replaced.
I'm not sure that's true, at least not in this case. Andy is an actual geek. He's just also an asshole. Being a geek doesn't stop you from being an asshole.
jjav said it best above:
> > The geeks won.
> For a very brief period, and then when the really big money started rolling in, all the personalities that used to flock to wall street became programmers.
> The Silicon Valley of the 90s was completely different to the thing it is now here.
"We are the guys who get to be future rapists, ego maniacs, and provide once in for all, it's not personality, just money and fortune that makes business shit"
Damn I thought these were the good guys.
There have been a number of signs over the past few years that they are very much not the good guys.
Can you reference some? I recall never trusting Proton, but I never had a reason why, just gut feeling. This stuff is vindicating, but I'm curious if I actually had a reason to feel the way I did or was right by accident. I don't have a great track record; I trusted Bitwarden and regret it, and the Mullvad situation is very disappointing (though not really related to the quality of the tech).
Someone in the comments on a previous 404 article listed a few things -- nothing necessarily "cancellable" in its own right, but drawing a pattern:
https://www.404media.co/proton-to-re-interview-staff-about-a...
- Praising the Republican Party and endorsing a Trump appointee.
- Andy choosing a username with 88 in it (a common Nazi dogwhistle) but then claiming it had a different meaning.
- Sponsoring a far-right French YouTuber and claiming they had no idea.
Again, nothing hard and fast. But it meant I was not at all surprised to find out how fucked up the company is on the inside.
The 88 thing is probably just because he's chinese.
And don't they sponsor like a crap ton of youtubers?
Yeah, I'll give him a pass on the 88 thing. Lots of Chinese people have these types of numbers for license plates, phone numbers, or bank account numbers. It has nothing to do with Nazis; they're just lucky numbers. Eight sounds like "发", which means becoming wealthy.
yeah, it's the "getting rich" part that...tips you off.
IIRC weren't they a non-profit for a while?
This doesn't make them bad guys, though.
edit: stating this based off of the linked post, but will read the article linked in the post as well.
edit edit: Okay, yeah. This seems like an awful place to work.
Being cruel to your employees qualifies, regardless whether they care about the product, IMO. And it seems like those employees did care. Words matter and shape the environment people work in.
There's a lot of people on this site who think successful tech execs and founders should be able to do whatever they want to anyone and their communities. They all think they'll become one soon enough, so they're protecting their imaginary class interests.
They're sheep being herded by tech billionaires, who've gotten them to think they're pets and that they definately won't slaughter the second they're hungry.
They're more like veal calves.
My comment wasn't meant to imply anything of the sort. I think you can adopt AI aggressively without being a total dickhead, more or less. Doing it at direct expense to others' well-being is clearly a problem. I'll read the nested article to see how wrong I am, but the initial post that's linked didn't seem to indicate Proton have gone to the dark side. I'd need more evidence to judge them like that.
I wasn't aware of cruelty; just that they are opting to use AI. The tracking of AI produced code is tough; I have that at my org too, but it's more so to get a sense for who's using it, so we can find out why, help them use it better, etc.
I also only read the initial post and not the entire 404 article. I suppose if I could edit my comment and have it maintain some posterity, I'd say something like "going all-in on AI doesn't make you evil", but I concede that these guys could certainly be assholes if there's more to it (I'll read the nested article).
Failure to take advantage of available tools does not suggest whether you are a good guy or a bad guy, just whether you are a competent guy or an incompetent guy.
Setting up a snitch network to "ruthlessly smash everything that stands in the way" suggests that you are a bad guy.
Whats an example of a company, that existed pre-AI that has so far failed to take advantage of AI and has fallen behind?
I see a ton of examples of companies overusing AI and destroying their brand/image and products, but not many who abstained and are hurting. Using AI does not give you automatic wins, and using it solely because its available does not make you competent.
Its going to be wildly distributed and varied so hard to spot, but look for companies where the main output was commodity B2B assets and you can see a real impact. Marketing copy, images, graphic design in the low and mid tiers. Real businesses supplied that stuff and even adopting AI wouldn't help, since their customers could just do it in house now.
There's heaps of companies between small and conglomerate and the middle area is where the commodity asset companies lived. Generating low stakes copy, art, apps and websites for small companies.
Okay I'll conceed there, but I dont think my rule applies to businesses that were already slop factories pre-ai.
That's fair. I would love for this to be studied one day, it would be good to know with some accuracy what proportion of creative/software is slop-factory versus novel, interesting work.
Tools have no morality but they do have effects and outcomes. That's where we make our judgement call on whether you're good or bad for using them.
Discussion (84 points, 36 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50289692
Great. I have a lifetime account that I purchased a decade ago and now I'm going to have to find something else. Thanks guys, thanks for ruining everything.
same. got a buncha domains there for email.
the signs were there for a while but this ain't helping. not jumping ship today, but that's mostly logistical -- but will start looking for other options.
like i do security and use AI daily -- and i am fully aware of what its good for and not good for. there still need to be engineers in the loop, and if it's just AI then i'm not a Proton customer I'm a [Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini/etc] customer.
Well, alternatively there's also AI services with better privacy than the mainstream ones, for example: https://confer.to/
There’s going all in on AI adoption, then there’s what proton has done.
This is disgusting, full stop. Destroying any sense of trust in your company by allowing people to rat on others is going to bite them in the ass.
And all for AI, which ultimately is a tool that the largest portion of people already have adopted and those that haven’t often understand it’s the way forward anyway. Like instead of letting your people do this organically, maintaining trust in their org, you poison it instead. And for what? A few extra dollars in the bank? The greed is gross.
Not to mention the loss of customers/potential customers. I always thought proton was one of the good companies. That’s out the window with this news.
I am very worried by yen’s careless attitude but qualifying an email address as “allowing people to rat” is exaggerating. Anyone can eat any time, emails are not new. It’s just an alias/mailer.
Time to find a new home for my email address.
You know any decent alternative? I have a Tuta address, but sometimes emails don't arrive.
I’ve been using Fastmail for years now. Easy to use, reliable, and consistent. No major extra features but that’s exactly what I want for an email provider! I see it recommended here sometimes, so I’m happy to be that guy today
Hey thanks I'll check it out!
--- EDIT: Ohhhhhh apparently it's paid-only. Yeah, I would pay for a decent email service, but I'm poor, so I can't afford that... Thanks, anyway!
It was a good run while it lasted. Guess I'll go back to self-hosting email. It's the only way to ensure things don't suddenly change.
[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50289692
Seems these days that the most marketable threat modelling for your product is against the company's own CEO.
I wish they can offer LLMs though an API with some good privacy (not a UI) since i can't come across any
Is it me or has Proton been getting more media coverage than usual very recently?
It seems like it has. My father who is provacy conscious but not really one to seek specific things out started talking about / investigating proton a couple of weeks ago. He is almost 80.
Those are the media outlets to cut out of your life. They're just proxies for PR firms.
FFS. ProtonVPN is borderline irreplaceable as one of the three or so VPNs that you don't have to trust because they've been tested in court not to have VPN logs. Losing one of them hurts.
Does this change your estimation of whether they will keep logs?
Based on my own usage, one of the things that AI continues to be really, really shit at is data governance. And this is a place where a “move fast at all costs” attitude simply will not do. It is just so very easy to accidentally start leaking data in a way that undermines privacy safeguards.
This issue is not unique to Proton. Tech companies are going either going "a fair bit" to "all" in on AI. Like Proton.
Who are the others? Mullvad I assume, although they had their own brush with bullshit not too long ago.
> although they had their own brush with bullshit not too long ago.
can you elaborate?
Their founder recently donated a large sum of money to an extreme far right/nationalist party in Sweden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mullvad#Donation_to_the_%C3%96...
Do anybody know another email provider easy to use and to migrate to?
I use soverin since I moved from gandi 3 years ago. I didn't had any problems in this time, but I also didn't registered my domain with them just in case.
You have got to be kidding me. One of the few companies I liked (past tense).
Based on that 404 Media article I'm done with proton. They've lost their way. https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-i...
Damn.
Any good alternatives?
https://www.tuta.com/ Is the only other major player I am aware of— although they have a significantly smaller product lineup than Proton, and aren’t as viable an alternative to Google for those who want a fully integrated suite. Tuta does Mail and Calendar fairly well, cant speak to their drive product.
The other option is self hosting.
> aren’t as viable an alternative to Google for those who want a fully integrated suite
Don't worry, they can vibe code the rest in no time. /s
For the kind of end-to-end encrypted support they advertise? Tuta is the only one I know of.
Email more broadly? I can heartily recommend Fastmail.
I don't really send anything sensitive over email if I can help it. Signal is a much better choice.
Andy Yen himself mentions "Tuta": https://tuta.com/en/secure-email
The CEO sounds like .. a loser. :) I'm kidding! He sounds very smart!
If the company isn't going to hit revenue targets they might actually need to fire people and this can be a good way to provide cover that devs aren't meeting requirements so they can be fired with cause.
A past company CEO sounded very similar to this internally before they fired 30% of the staff because they didn't have enough money.
My current vibe reading on CEOs who think every job can be done with AI today is the athlete who starts celebrating before crossing the finish line, to be passed bysomeone who takes the win. My guys, it's not that good yet!
who cares? i'm not so sure the current quality of software can get much lower and responsible use of ai could have big upside.
Fully expecting this will get me a torrent of downvotes here, but...
I'm not sure he's wrong. I'm speculating here but I can imagine the kind of developers Proton attracts--likely people who care a lot about the code and who care about the craft. That's fine, but when you're running a company in this environment, and that's what things look like internally, you do have to be a little brutal to shake people out of old ways. A manifesto titled "Your old job is gone" may actually be warranted.
It sounds a lot like there are people internally who are still fighting the shift, and they've taken to leaking things that hurt the company's security image. Part of the CEO's job, if he's going to push hard in the direction he's decided on, is to fire those people who will undermine it before they do. That this has all now backfired is entirely on him. Maybe he thought he was "motivating" people by calling them losers, or shaking them out of an outmoded way of thinking about what we do, but none of that matters when you have employees attacking your main selling point and the core image of the company in public.
He's not wrong that he needs to move fast, or that processes need to change, or that the job has changed, but his execution isn't so great.
He'll probably survive just fine though.
You can absolutely shake people out of their ways without being a raging asshole.
Also, they don't need shaking out of their ways. Aren't the AI bros always trying to tell us to evaluate the results, not the tool used to produce them? That argument cuts both ways. The Proton engineers are demonstrably doing a good job at building the software, so they shouldn't be punished if they believe LLMs aren't the right tool for the job.
That's true!
Article seems somewhat one sided to me. The style of the CEO doesn't sound good, but there's no discussion of specific tooling, harnesses, and other automation they have in place. Reading the letter posted, it sounds like they've got more in place than the article implies but people have been resisting adopting.
Yeah this sounds a lot to me like blowback from current or former employees. There's no specific evidence yet of bad security practices, but the mere suggestion of it is a problem for a company whose image is centered on privacy. It's a knife well-aimed by someone who knew where to aim it.
> this sounds a lot to me like blowback from current or former employees
Well, yeah. They're the ones who are harmed by Andy's behavior, so obviously they're the ones speaking up. How does this disqualify anything they're saying?
Is it good security practice to replace engineers with product managers?
"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."
By the way, this is where the industry would like to go. Pay attention, people.
Why not have the engineers, or "implementors", known for systems thinking, build things with AI? A team of product managers building things is like saying I want my factory floor manager on the tools, running the machines. The evolution of that role just lands you at a team of implementors again, who still need a leader. You already have that.
In a sense, you're demoting your managers to implementors, and getting rid of their leadership role altogether. Simultaneously getting rid of your prior engineers and all the domain and tribal knowledge they had built up.
It seems to me an intentionally provocative formulation, and maybe a symptom of an ongoing internal shake-up. But think about it--is he really saying anything so different compared to what some of our best well-known engineers like antirez have been saying?
I think we all know the game has changed. The question would be whether the CEO is handling that effectively. On that score I don't think he is. It sounds like a slow-moving mutiny is going on, and to have it blow up in the press means you've already failed.
> I think we all know the game has changed.
We do not all know anything of the sort. From my perspective, the game hasn't changed at all, and it's just a bunch of people hyping up a bubble who think it has.
If you haven't been convinced by now, I don't think you ever will be. I've been in this game long enough (20+ years) to have seen shifts before and I can confidently tell what's hype and what's not. For example, "rewrite everything in Rust" about 10 years ago was hype, and a way for a lot of young devs to establish themselves against their older, already established peers. (Keep in mind this is a statement on the hype, not the actual technology!) The history of technology revolutions also shows that some people simply cannot cope, whether for lack of skill, avoidance of loss, prior monetary or psychological investments that force them into a position of denial/negation, and so on. Those people simply get left behind.
The hard truth: the tech, and the economic system it's mixed with, do not care what your reasoned critique is, what your fine distinctions are, etc. Stated another way, if Capital finds in technology a new means for revolutionizing the mode of production, then it will push that forward, generalize it, expand it, and draw all of its consequences, even if that technology is not ideal!
Posting the CEO's own words seems pretty fair to the CEO.
I'm not disputing the criticism of the CEO. I'm pointing out there are details we don't know about how Proton is using AI internally.
So, completely ignoring the abusive CEO as an issue of its own, I think there's one very important aspect of AI usage that's already clear from the article:
« 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 »
It's very hard to build reliable and secure products in a fearful environment. This sort of thing has come up in root cause analyses of disasters. We don't need to know whether Proton has defined "guardrails" for AI usage, or what the processes are like; there will be problems, gaps, and employees will be unable to raise those issues with management. That's all I need to know, really.
After everything in the past six months do we really think that humans are better than coding agents at writing secure code?! This announcement honestly makes me more confident not less in their products.
Yes
Commonly attributed to Upton Sinclair:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Just like other advances in technology have replaced jobs, AI will replace jobs.
I'm sure the elevator opperators lamented push-button controls that anyone could just press too.
It sucks, but I imagine most programmers are smart enough to be able to pivot careers or how they do their jobs.
The lump of labor fallacy is a fallacy not real. Phrased another way, demand for software is more or less infinite so if coding agents make everyone a 10x engineer eventually we will easily find use for 10x more software.
> demand for software is more or less infinite so if coding agents make everyone a 10x engineer eventually we will easily find use for 10x more software.
That will probably be true.
How? Isn’t there a finite number of people and a finite amount of time to interact with software?
You underestimate just how much software humans can interact with in any given second. ;)
Sure, but that’s not infinite. It’s always a zero sum game: if someone is playing my game then they're not playing yours (even if someone else might be)
Ah, so this one of the reasons why in 2026 every single app / software suite / et al takes 2+ seconds to load, is slow and buggy, and overall a pain to use.
Since software is in some ways information + machine a near infinite amount can be created. I'm not sure I want to live in that world.
Claude is very capable of making your code run faster if you ask. It knows every profiling trick in the book.