Proton CEO calls a pentest window 'loser thinking', 404 Media reports

Proton CEO Andy Yen called an engineer's request for a short pentest window "bullshit and loser thinking". The exchange was in the company's security Slack channel at the end of August. 404 Media published the story on 29 October, by reporter Joseph Cox. The report cites Slack messages, an internal AI manifesto, and nine current and former Proton staff. Yen also wrote "only losers think like that". He told the team to "stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more".

Proton CTO Bart Butler said in an internal meeting that 90 percent of October's code was written by AI. 404 Media cites audio of the meeting. Much of that code is written through Anthropic's Claude, the article says, citing multiple staff. Yen tells people in Slack to use Claude. One employee told the reporter: "We are a tech company against Big Tech who are spending loads on Claude".

What the Slack chats and the manifesto say

Proton's CTO posted a company-wide AI manifesto one Friday afternoon last month, 404 Media reports. The post told engineers "Your old job is gone". It said that not accepting AI was "an existential threat to the success of the mission itself". The manifesto lists three changes, 404 Media writes. Engineers should help models write better code faster. Most code should be reviewed by AI rather than by humans. And the company should commit to "the transformation that the moment requires".

In the pentest Slack thread, an engineer asked Yen for specifics. The engineer wanted to know how AI-written code would be checked for security issues. 404 Media quotes the exchange. Yen's reply told the team that "every developer should be doing this and checking their code". He added that this was manual before, and "now they can do faster with AI". A separate employee in the same thread wrote: "security is low in our prioritization at present".

What the company told the reporter

A Proton spokesperson did not dispute any of 404 Media's reporting. The spokesperson said "some people at Proton are unhappy with our direction, or misunderstand it, and many people are anxious". The company has sometimes been "too blunt or too slow" in explaining itself, the spokesperson said.

404 Media also reports an internal document on company performance. It says Proton is "not on track" to hit its annual recurring revenue target. It says growth is "far away from what the market today considers to be good". Proton told staff this week it would re-interview them about their use of AI, the article says. The email read: "these re-interviews are consequential". Yen told a senior employee in Slack that the company already knows "more or less who is behind".

The reader of this story is writing code with the same models. The piece is a rare on-the-record view of what one security-focused company is asking of its engineers. The question to carry out of it is whether the review step on your own team is still intact. If a short pentest window is now called "loser thinking", that is a decision somebody made out loud. Catch it the first time it happens.

Source

• Manifestos, Fear, and 'Loser Thinking': Inside Proton's AI Reckoning by Joseph Cox, 404 Media.
• Hacker News discussion, 119 points at the time of writing.