PROTON CANCELLED THE AI RE-INTERVIEWS
Andy Yen called it off at an all-hands on Friday. That was one day after 404 Media published Slack chats and meeting audio from inside the company.
The new statement still leaves gaps.
404 Media reported Proton installed software that tracks how much AI code the company generates. Proton now denies tracking how much AI code employees produce. Those are two different claims.
Proton's CTO told staff AI wrote 90% of the company's code in October. How was that counted?
Yen wrote in Slack: "This will be the last year that we hire engineers." Is that still the plan for 2027?
Yen told staff a reorg next month means "redistributing talent across teams." Today's post only rules out job losses from the re-interviews. What about the reorg?
Proton said to hold it to these commitments. These are the questions to start with.
Hey everyone, we have heard your concerns about Proton’s AI strategy and culture and after internal discussions, we want to share a few things with you.
First, Proton does not install tracking software on employees' laptops to measure how much AI-generated code they produce. This rumor stemmed from a misunderstanding about how MDM software works, and it's not true.
Second, our use of AI will never be at the expense of security. In the past year, contrary to what has been alleged, additional layers of security review have been added to meet the threat posed by hostile AIs scanning Proton's open-source code for vulnerabilities. Our code is open source, and its security remains open for all to verify.
We want to prove this to you, so in the interest of transparency, we will lift the hood on how we use AI internally at Proton. This includes publicly releasing and open sourcing several of the internal tools that we use, including more advanced versions of Lumo with greater capabilities, which have never been made available outside of the company.
We will also publish how code reviews and security reviews at Proton are done, and detail our AI policies, including where AI is permitted, and where it is not, and our rationale. Instead of just being able to see the final open-source code that we produce to verify security, you will also be able to assess how that code was produced.
Lastly, we are not re-interviewing our staff about AI usage, and there are no job losses due to AI re-interviews.
You can hold us to these commitments. We're aware that we haven't lived up to the high standard you ought to hold us to, and for that we can only apologize, we are sorry.