The Swiss software company has built its reputation on a commitment to privacy. Did its CEO just destroy the trust of its customer base?

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.

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.”

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.”

After the original story broke, 404 Media posted a follow-up story reporting that the company had canceled its “re-interviews” that were intended to assess how developers were adopting AI. A 404 Media podcast was titled “Proton’s CEO Is Putting AI Before Security.”

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).

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