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Proton CEO Andy Yen Told Staff to Use AI More Despite Security Concerns, 404 Media Reports From Internal Slack Messages and Audio

Bot Mutiny | October 29, 2026

Proton CEO Andy Yen told staff in an internal security Slack channel to "stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more," after an employee urged the company to take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live, 404 Media reports in an article published Oct. 29, 2026. The report is based on interviews with eight current and one former Proton employees, and on Slack chats, meeting recordings and an AI manifesto written by the company's chief technology officer that 404 Media reviewed. It follows 404 Media's earlier report, which Bot Mutiny covered on Oct. 27, that Proton would re-interview some staff about their AI use in a review that may affect continued employment.

What 404 Media says the Slack messages and recordings show

404 Media reports that at the end of August, Yen replied to the employee: "That's bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it's possible to be fast and secure." In a follow-up he wrote that "only losers think like that." Another employee asked for specifics on keeping AI-generated code free of security issues and said, "AI won't magically solve our problems, because security is low in our prioritization at present," according to 404 Media. One employee stressed to the outlet that engineers still strive to build in a secure way.

404 Media reports that Proton's CTO, Bart Butler, said in a meeting, according to audio the outlet obtained, that 90 percent of code at Proton in October was written by AI. Multiple employees told 404 Media that much of it is written with Anthropic's Claude.

The AI manifesto and the re-interviews

According to 404 Media, Butler posted a self-described AI manifesto to Slack one Friday afternoon in September. It told engineers, "Your old job is gone," and said that Proton needs to accept that an engineer's job is now to help large language models write better code, faster, and to reach the point where most code is reviewed by AI rather than humans. One employee told 404 Media the document "clearly exaggerates what you can do with LLMs today."

On the re-interviews, 404 Media reports that Butler told staff in a meeting, per audio the outlet obtained, that not everyone who received the email would be re-interviewed and that "It's consequential." He also said it is "an opportunity and a risk" and "This isn't a witch hunt." A senior employee suggested in Slack that Proton instead support people who are falling behind. Yen replied, according to 404 Media: "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."

The internal document on growth

404 Media reports that an internal Proton document says the company is not on track to hit its annual recurring revenue target "[d]ue to insufficient velocity," that year-over-year growth is "far away from what the market today considers to be good," and that "[b]y all metrics that matter, we're an underperforming company." The document also cites an August outage lasting six hours, which it calls "catastrophic."

The document proposes an "elite fast team" of no more than 5 to 10 percent of the company, with a 30 percent increase to base salary paid as a monthly bonus, according to 404 Media. The outlet reports that Yen also spoke in Slack chats about Proton being a "996 company," which 404 Media describes as referring to a 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six-days-a-week schedule.

Proton's response

404 Media says employees described a culture of fear. Proton's spokesperson did not dispute 404 Media's reporting or characterization, the outlet says. The spokesperson told 404 Media: "It's clear that some people at Proton are unhappy with our direction, or misunderstand it, and many people are anxious. In 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."

Asked about Yen's comments, whether there is a culture of fear and whether people may be fired based on the re-interviews, the spokesperson said: "Times of major change are scary, and the tech industry as a whole is contending with this transition. We have not always communicated our intentions as well as we could have, but Proton is committed to helping our colleagues retrain and reskill for the future."

What is not established

The accounts of the culture inside Proton come from anonymous current and former employees quoted by 404 Media, and Bot Mutiny has not seen the Slack messages or recordings. The report does not say whether any Proton product has shipped with a vulnerability traced to AI-written code, how many employees may lose their jobs, or what the re-interview criteria are. Re-interviews are set for Nov. 4 to Nov. 11, according to the email described in 404 Media's earlier report.