ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Comments by Proton’s CEO caused a backlash in its privacy-focused community.
- The company says managing security without AI is like bringing a knife to a gunfight.
- The controversy has created a crisis of trust for a company whose business depends on it.
It hasn’t been a good month for Proton, the Swiss technology company best known for privacy-focused products like Proton Mail and Proton VPN. Now, in a <a href="https://proton.me/blog/how-proton-keeps-your-data-secure” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>blog post published today, the company is defending its use of AI and assuring customers that its security safeguards remain intact.
The company’s reputation took a major hit two weeks ago, when 404 Media published a detailed report, based on leaked Slack messages and interviews with anonymous insiders. The story detailed a push by Proton CEO Andy Yen to — in his own words — “ruthlessly smash everything that stands in the way of AI velocity.”
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After one employee proposed spending at least a few days on penetration testing before shipping new code, Yen reportedly said, “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.” According to 404 Media’s account, Yen’s message for Proton engineers was to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
Reputational damage
That kind of accusation is especially damaging to a company like Proton, whose primary value proposition is privacy and security. The company was founded by engineers at CERN, the Swiss-based physics lab best known for running the Large Hadron Collider (it’s also the birthplace of the World Wide Web). Today, the for-profit Proton AG is primarily owned by the nonprofit Proton Foundation, a structure designed to preserve Proton’s mission to be “private by default,” one that “places people over profits.”
Reddit has an especially active Proton community with 345,000 weekly visitors. It quickly filled up with so many comments — the majority of them negative — that moderators created a single megathread to help keep track of the different threads, including pages for general criticism, support of the AI usage, and “leaving your goodbyes.”
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Given the level of interest, it’s not surprising that Yen chose that forum to post a public message to the community. In it, he apologized for “hurtful” remarks, adding that he’s “determined to do better.”
He also addressed the topic of AI-based security reviews:
But most importantly, I need to categorically state that our use of AI will never be at the expense of security. In the past year, contrary to what has been alleged, actually additional layers of security review have been added to meet the threat posed by hostile AIs scanning Proton’s open source code for vulnerabilities. Fast and secure need not be mutually exclusive. We also leverage AI to find vulnerabilities in our own code before attackers do. Our code is open source, and its security remains open for all to verify. [emphasis in original]
Nothing in the 404 Media reporting demonstrates that Proton weakened its encryption or shipped insecure code because of AI. The damage is different: Yen’s remarks undermined confidence that management will consistently respect the security processes its customers rely on.
Proton’s response
In a blog post that Proton shared with ZDNET ahead of its publication today, the company followed up on Yen’s promise to “lift the hood on how we use AI internally at Proton.” The post, titled “How Proton keeps your data secure in the age of AI,” was signed by the Proton Team and emphasizes Proton’s secure architecture, with end-to-end, zero-access encryption:
We do not hold the keys to your emails, files, or passwords, so we cannot read them, and no AI tool can, either. Our documented security governance policies have not changed since June 2024, before AI was even a major factor in our work here, and they all still apply.
On Reddit, Yen said, “AI is here, and it will unquestionably change how software is developed forever, and Proton must also change.” Today’s post clarified that code receives the same checks whether it is written by a human, by an AI agent, or by a combination of both. Every change receives automated security scans but also requires human approval; sensitive changes, such as core cryptography work, require review by specialist teams. Major feature designs are also reviewed for security, dependencies, testing, and deployment plans.
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Those policies address the most serious technical concerns raised by the current controversy, although outsiders have no way to know from the policy alone how consistently those safeguards are followed in day-to-day development.
Should a modern software company use AI for security? Proton argues that it can’t afford not to.
Because of AI, attacks that once might have required a nation-state can now be executed by almost anyone. A defender relying on manual processes and hand-crafted tools is bringing a knife to a gunfight. An attacker only needs to find one flaw, while a defender needs to close all of them. AI is the only tool that makes that defense possible. Cybersecurity is an arms race, and the teams working on security at Proton have been some of the earliest adopters of AI, because the safety of your data depends on winning that race.
But that argument doesn’t really address the objection. The current controversy isn’t about whether Proton should use AI to find vulnerabilities; it’s about whether pressure for “AI velocity” can override the judgment of engineers responsible for keeping its products secure.
Proton says it uses AI to review code changes, identify vulnerabilities through continuous security reviews, and monitor an attack surface that has “grown far beyond what unaided humans could monitor.” The company uses its own models alongside non-public cyber models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Can Proton rebuild trust?
The modern software development landscape is torn by two opposing forces. On one side, you have AI-based tools that are routinely finding nightmarish vulnerabilities in existing codebases and then exploiting them immediately. On the other side, you have a global movement that’s skeptical of the benefits of AI and outright opposed to construction of the data centers where they run.
Much of Proton’s growth over the past few years has been the direct result of people trying to escape big tech. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that many of Proton’s customers — at least those who are passionate enough to visit a Reddit forum — are deeply skeptical of anything related to AI.
The technology may be useful or even essential to shoring up security, but a significant share of the privacy-oriented audience Proton has cultivated is predisposed to distrust AI companies and AI-driven development.
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In a traditional software company, that realization would have led management to cautiously roll out AI-based features and reveal its AI-centric security strategy more deliberately. That didn’t happen here, obviously. Those blunt remarks from the CEO exposed a management culture that many employees and customers found troubling. It’s difficult to restore trust, both within the workforce and among customers, after that kind of public display of contempt.
Ironically, one of Yen’s comments from the original 404 Media story describes the company’s current dilemma with devastating accuracy.
In a Slack message, Yen told a Proton engineer, “perception is more important than truth, the truth doesn’t matter if you don’t win on perception.” The implication was that he was urging the employee to lie, or at least shade the truth. In fact, as Yen himself told a random Reddit commenter:
I do not believe perception should be more important than truth. I am stating that unfortunately it often ends up being the case. If you place it into the context in which it was said, it can be understood as, “it doesn’t matter that the truth is that Proton’s PQC implementation is better, this truth is irrelevant as long as it is not perceived to be this way, and we therefore need to correct that perception”
That’s Proton’s challenge now, distilled to its essence. It takes seconds to destroy a reputation. It can take months or years to rebuild the perception that the company and its management can no longer be trusted.
For people who are deeply concerned with privacy, Proton is still a viable choice. Its architecture is solid and its development staff, at least for now, is intact. The blowback from the current controversy has focused management’s attention on the things that matter. And most alternatives, like Tuta and Mailfence, are small and still untested.
Personally, I will continue to use Proton Pass and Proton VPN, both of which are solid, reliable products. But I’ve moved my secondary email accounts (which I had migrated from Gmail to Proton Mail); they’re now running on Fastmail. I had been considering making the switch for a long time, primarily because Proton Mail’s performance has been too slow for my taste. Current events just hastened that switch.
