Proton's Yen Cancels AI 'Re-Interviews', Keeps Push

Proton CEO Andy Yen cancelled a round of mandatory company-wide "re-interviews" that would have forced employees to defend how much AI they were using, one day after 404 Media published internal messages from the push.

In the climb-down, Yen told staff "there was a communication failure on my part and many things could have been communicated differently" and said "we've decided to actually cancel the re-interviews." CTO Bart Butler put it less diplomatically: "we fucked up, we know we fucked up."

The policy survived the apology. "Going forward, I'm still going to push," Yen said. Staff told 404 Media that the metrics the re-interviews were meant to capture will instead become a component of performance reviews, the same measurement moved into a routine channel that is harder to leak.

The original investigation, built on interviews with eight current and one former Proton employee, documented Yen urging engineers to "stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more" and dismissing security pushback as "bullshit and loser thinking." Users responded by downvoting Yen's Reddit defence and cancelling paid subscriptions.