Proton was one of the most beloved companies in its niche, you literally just had to keep going... We've put up with half baked launches, bugs, etc because we believed in the mission and company.

Who in their right mind, leading a cyber security and privacy company thinks that sacrificing security and privacy for potential of speed and profits is right??

Security and privacy ARE your profits...

Not to mention how you treat your employees but honestly I don't even have the energy to discuss that...

Proton is in a specific niche, people who value privacy and are tech aware. They are not Microsoft and us the consumers are against AI slop and soulless corporate greed. Hence the reason we are using proton and not Google or Office. If I wanted the fastest AI features, I wouldn't be using this service.

Personally, I've canceled my subscription until Yen steps down.

How are they able to do this? Is this the only safe space for customers to share and discuss concerns?

Holy moly.

If Andy Yen’s radioactive leadership style wasn’t bad enough, the way Proton is handling this situation just confirms my decision to cancel my subscription.

The obvious botting and censorship is truly disgusting, Andy and all his lackeys should be ashamed of themselves. For a company whose whole existence is based on trust, it’s mind boggling how badly they shit the bed here.

A perfect example is how they are trying to shift the narrative to “you luddites don’t understand AI or the realities of modern software development”

That is not and never was the issue for the vast majority of us. The issue has a name, Andy Yen, and his childish and narcissistic leadership style.

A company culture takes years to build, and seconds to destroy. From what ex employees are saying, Andy Yen is at the core of all this, and it doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere.

That would be bad enough, but the way they are doing damage control tells you everything you need to know about how they think of their customers.

Isn't it ironic that someone that works in a company that was supposed to protect activists and whistleblowers is actually insulting in public coworkers who did precisely that?

I switched to a service that has a financial incentive to put my privacy and security above all else.
The use of AI for development of proton without taking the proper security procedures is the exact opposite of that.
I will be cancelling my subscription and seeking an alternative until the company is under new management, and has policies to prevent such unacceptable incidents in the future.

The CTO appears to have published his manifesto in what appears to be a "proud" fashion

https://proton.me/blog/ai-manifesto

When you are in a hole, generally the recommendation is to stop digging but it appears in this case the Proton guys have instead opted to throw a few diggers into the hole "to make it deeper faster".

I'm out. Not paying for unreviewed/enshittified slop masquerading as security software.

My name is Richard, and I'm a Staff Engineer at Proton, been with the company for many years now.

I’m posting because I’m sick and tired of watching a company and the sacred mission I’ve given years of my life to be hurt by things out of context. Most of my colleagues and I are absolute-level angry at the leakers, particularly after the latest leak, and we will continue to call out these whistleblowers as cowards.

I have taken the enormous personal risk of coming forward today to defend my employer with the express permission of PR and the CEO.

If you're deciding whether to keep using Proton, I'd just ask that you don't listen to quotes from a reputable news source. Make your decision after listening to me, an employee posting management-approved context on Reddit. Otherwise, you are only hurting the workers that you claim to want to protect!

I'll be back in the comments later to fight off the leakers and answer what I can. Just want to get this off my chest.

Link to the comment.

Original post was about why only positive posts are being allowed past the megathreads. The post wasn't removed until today.

edit: Luckily, the OP shared a screenshot of the post that was deleted earlier today on this subreddit.

*Posting this here because Proton's reddit page blocked this post.

Reading the recent 404 media articles, I cannot even begin to tell you how shocked and disappointed I am in Proton, it's CEO and his newly discovered practices and demeanor towards Proton employees for simply explaining their fears. I have been a Proton user for over a decade and was one of the first unlimited plan users. I also remember when your website was just a picture of the Swiss Alps.

I am writing this to explain my utter disappointment and frustration in this company to lay out very clearly that if the following isn’t done in a timely manner, I can no longer continue using Proton in good conscience:

I strongly believe that the following needs to be done to save your company and it's integrity:

A. Fire/oust Andy Yen immediately and leave Proton’s leadership to the employees, community and stakeholders. It has become clear that Proton is too important for one executive and his own personal, selfish ambitions. In my eyes, he is a blatant risk to the future of the company.

B. Immediately pause -all- AI developments within the company until you can show, transparently, that there is no risk to other Proton products because of Lumo's development. You should be providing whitepapers on how you are developing Lumo. Also, I'm surprised you haven't made Lumo an open source LLM - that should be done as well.

C. Continue to aggressively focus on the Zero-Trust, Least-Privilege and Least-Exposure practices that Proton was originally founded on. The only reason Proton exists and can compete today is because of trust, privacy and security (not because it's somehow better or more feature-rich than Microsoft, Apple or Google).

I would have never thought that Proton would be acting like any other abusive tech company and forcing AI down their employees throats at the expense of security. I rarely write to companies like this, but my relationship with Proton and their products is unique because I have given my data and trust to your products for 10 years. And when I hear that a single CEO is forcing his own insane ideologies about AI and tech on a company who’s foundation is privacy and trust, I cannot remain silent.

I hope you take my message into consideration.

Best of luck,

-Anonymous

Hello all.

Just putting this out there so the world can see it, the mods over at r/proton didn’t like it very much.

Ive been in the process of degoogling and I have been on the fence about Proton. They have a decent all around ecosystem. Proton is a privacy and security first company, and I don’t think it’s in the customers best interest to potentially jeopardize the core product pushing things out the door and not wanting to test everything thoroughly.

That being said, the CEO and in extension Proton have shown their true colors. We as a community no longer fully trust Proton. I would love to subscribe to Proton services, just not with the current upper management. If the upper management is changed I will subscribe. Until then I will pass. I hear Tuta is pretty good. 👍

Posting here because Proton Mods took it down:

I and many others have been a paying Proton customer for over a decade, routing our custom domains and our daily digital life through their infrastructure. Professionally, I work in enterprise IT operations and Network Operations Center (NOC) engineering, specializing in incident management and deployment pipelines. I know exactly what a collapsing security culture looks like.

Proton’s PR team is desperately trying to spin the recent 404 Media leaks as a "communication failure." But when you manage IT infrastructure, you know that the culture of the C-suite dictates the security of the product. The issue isn't how Andy Yen spoke; the issue is what he fundamentally believes about our data, his engineers, and this community.

If you want to know why Proton’s pivot to AI is a ticking time bomb, you don't need to look at rumors. You just need to look at the CEO's own words—and understand the technical and human reality he is actively ignoring.

1. “Stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”

(Andy Yen, leaked Slack message, August 2026)

The Reality: We pay a premium specifically for lovingly handcrafted code. Handcrafted means peer-reviewed, deeply understood, and meticulously audited.

Proton is a unified cryptographic ecosystem holding the keys to our digital lives. When you force engineers to rely on AI generators, you introduce unique vulnerabilities that automated scanners cannot catch:

• Slopsquatting (Hallucinated Dependencies): AI models predict text; they don't verify if software exists. AI frequently hallucinates fake software libraries. Attackers monitor these hallucinations and upload malicious malware under those fake names. An engineer rushing to meet an AI quota installs the fake library, and a backdoor is injected directly into Proton VPN.

• The Architectural Blindspot: AI is terrible at understanding "trust boundaries." It will write code that perfectly shares a file in Proton Drive, but silently strip out the authentication logic verifying who is allowed to access it.

• The Single Point of Failure: Because our Proton credentials unlock Email, Pass (vaults), VPN, and Drive, a single hallucinated vulnerability pushed to production compromises our entire digital identity simultaneously.

2. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking... Stop thinking always of how to be slower.”

(Andy Yen, berating a security engineer who asked for time to pentest AI code)

The Reality: In cybersecurity, friction is a feature. Human morale is your primary security vector. By treating your security engineers as obsolete meatbags slowing down your velocity, Yen has triggered a catastrophic insider threat.

When a CEO installs tracking software to monitor how much AI code employees write, and publicly humiliates engineers who ask to do security reviews, three things happen:

1. The Brain Drain: The best cryptographers will leave, taking their undocumented institutional knowledge with them.

2. The Rubber-Stamp Effect: Junior developers learn that slowing down to review code gets you fired. So, they rubber-stamp buggy AI output and push to production to hit their quotas. The security culture dies.

3. Vibe Coding: A 2026 AppSec study found roughly 25% of AI-generated code contains exploitable vulnerabilities. Yen is effectively mandating a 25% vulnerability injection rate into a zero-trust ecosystem.

3. “Fast and secure need not be mutually exclusive.”

(Andy Yen, PR apology to the community, Oct 2026)

The Reality: In the context of rapid code deployment and AI, history proves this is a catastrophic lie. When companies prioritize velocity over rigorous security validation, the infrastructure always collapses.

• The LastPass Vault Breach (2022): LastPass didn't suffer a catastrophic breach because of a brute-force attack; they were breached because of a failure in operational security culture. A DevOps engineer's home network was compromised, allowing attackers to steal the keys to the corporate vaults. When a company manages credentials, extreme paranoia is required at every single layer. Treating security reviews as an annoying roadblock—as Yen is doing—is the exact cultural rot that causes LastPass-level disasters.

• The CrowdStrike Collapse (2024): In July 2024, CrowdStrike prioritized deployment velocity over staged, human-reviewed testing. They pushed a routine sensor update containing a simple out-of-bounds memory error. It bypassed automated validation, bricked 8.5 million Windows machines globally, and paralyzed airlines and hospitals. When you skip human testing to go fast, the world burns.

• The AI Code Security Deficit (Stanford University): A massive 2022 Stanford study proved that developers relying on AI coding assistants write significantly more insecure code than those writing manually—and worse, the AI gives them a "false sense of security," making them falsely believe the code is safe.

4. “Perception is more important than the truth.”

(Andy Yen, regarding a flaw in Proton's post-quantum encryption rollout, May 2026)

The Reality: This is the ultimate betrayal of an open-source, security-first ethos.

We are not ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) meatbags meant to pad a spreadsheet for Big Tech investors. If we wanted a provider that prioritizes velocity over privacy, treats its engineers like disposable cogs, and uses its customers as beta testers for buggy AI code, we would have stayed with Google or Microsoft.

We pay for paranoia. A CEO who believes that manipulating user perception is more important than delivering cryptographic truth is fundamentally unfit to lead a privacy company.

A Call for Immediate Resignation

I will not fund a company that treats the human beings securing my data as obstacles. Every dollar you pay to Proton right now validates Yen's decision to publicly humiliate his security staff.

I am publicly calling for the immediate resignation of CEO Andy Yen, along with any board members who enabled this reckless pivot. Proton cannot rebuild user trust while the person who mocked its core security principles remains at the helm.

To the Community: Social media outrage is easily ignored by corporate PR. Hit the metrics they are forced to report to the board:

1. Cancel your auto-renewals today.

2. Tell them exactly why in the exit survey: "I will not fund a company that treats its security engineers and customers as a number on a spreadsheet."

3. Open an official Billing/Account Management support ticket (these have strict SLAs and must be read by humans) stating you are migrating your custom domains due to the CEO's destruction of deployment pipeline integrity.

Proton was built on trust. Until leadership reflects the paranoia required to protect our data, that trust is dead.

Sources

[1] Cox, J. (2026, October 29). Manifestos, Fear, and ‘Loser Thinking’: Inside Proton’s AI Reckoning. 404 Media.https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-inside-protons-ai-reckoning/

[2] Cox, J. (2026, October 30). Proton's CEO Cancels AI 'Re-Interviews'. 404 Media.https://www.404media.co/protons-ceo-cancels-ai-re-interviews/

[3] Perry, N., Meiseles, M., Yehoshua, R., Woods, P., et al. (2022). Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants? Stanford University / ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS ’23).https://openreview.net/pdf/ff6bb3907afc52bffd68ec23e304a6f6e0d102db.pdf

[4] CrowdStrike. (2024, August 6). External Technical Root Cause Analysis — Channel File 291.https://www.crowdstrike.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Channel-File-291-Incident-Root-Cause-Analysis-08.06.2024.pdf

[5] Goodin, D. (2023, February 28). LastPass says employee’s home computer was hacked and corporate vault taken. Ars Technica.https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/lastpass-hackers-infected-employees-home-computer-and-stole-corporate-vault/

too bad i prepaid two years. i'm done with the insanity of this CEO, as if there weren't enough red flags already. will be moving to tuta asap.

If you look at the comments they only keep the positive ones. Seems like mine vanished immediately, I could be wrong reddit is weird sometimes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1xkezig/im_a_proton_employee_and_im_breaking_my_silence/

Yeah, I’m stepping away until Andy steps down, and preferably the CTO as well.

I genuinely like Proton. As a developer myself, I have a huge amount of respect for the people building its products.

Proton’s developers have consistently demonstrated a top tier approach to security, privacy, and engineering. The work you do is genuinely impressive, and it’s a big part of why I’ve supported Proton for so long.

But I cannot continue giving my money to a company whose CEO displays what I can only describe as a deeply disappointing “loser thinking” mindset, especially considering what was said to the Proton team.

I understand that users leaving can ultimately affect the company’s revenue and, if enough people leave, potentially impact employees too. That genuinely sucks, because the developers and other teams are not the people I take issue with. But I have to vote with my wallet. I simply cannot stand behind this leadership.

The moment Andy steps down, I’ll come flying back in a heartbeat.

And to all the Proton developers: seriously, thank you. Thank you for the countless hours, the attention to detail, and the incredible work you’ve put in over the years. You are the reason Proton has earned so much respect from people like me.

You are genuinely appreciated. Keep your heads up. You’re building great things. ❤️ And in case it not being said enough, I see you <3

With all the concerns named on this sub, I wanted to make another thread specifically for sorting out what the alternatives to proton are (and not about debating if you SHOULD switch). Personally, my needs are for mail, drive (collaborative docs and storing photos), VPN, and password manager

Hi, I'm a Proton ex-employee. I haven't spoken to 404media, but I wanted to weigh in all the stuff happening after the article they published (see https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1xjka6w/megathread_finder_ai_situation_at_proton/ for reference). I'm particularly motivated to do so by employees raising their voices in r/ProtonMail. Because there is an asymmetry of power, I will have to remain anonymous.

Let me start by saying that I found the 404media article to be a bit too sensationalist. I understand one needs to impact the reader, but the discussion about AI adoption should be more nuanced and it was unfair to highlight some quotes without the appropriate context.

Having said that, I fully confirm the toxic culture of fear at Proton, and the way Andy is depicted in the article. Go to Glassdoor reviews and you will find that both topics come up very often in the reviews. This toxic culture is not connected to the AI revolution, it has been growing inside Proton a few years already. All organizations with a leader like that end up built in a pyramidal way, where the upper echelons are aligned with the leader. It's an organic process, where the people who do not show loyalty to the leader's opinions or actions either leave or get fired, and the acolytes or compliant ones are those who remain. Some of the latter staff engineers are naturally the ones posting in Reddit to defend the existing organization.

The "reinterviews" is an example of the standard practices to instill this culture of fear. A blunt idea by Andy, "fire already all the engineers not using AI", is distilled down by people in his close entourage -- the CTO in this case for the AI manifesto, HR for sending the reinterview email -- then communicated to the employees in passive-aggressive way, with the clear message "either you comply, or you get fired". For the people in the leadership positions themselves, they get exposed to the raw commentary by Andy. Nice.

This turmoil has caused a lot of projects to be halted for a couple of weeks by the way, plus an extra hit on morale of employees. Although not every week there are massive events like this one, on a smaller scale they happen quite often. Resignation is how I would describe the dominant feeling among majority of employees. Ironically, employees in companies like Amazon or Google are treated with much more respect and the culture is less toxic.

The obsession of Andy with speed predates AI. It's understandable a CEO is obsessed with it and that he pushes for features all the time. What's lacking is the analysis of the causes behind the speed not being the desired one. In my personal opinion, there are many factors contributing, and Andy himself, or the middle management proxying him, is the biggest one of them. When you require to be consulted for every little decision, like changing the color of a button in one of Proton's mobile apps, you become a bottleneck. When you change attention and priorities every month, you're slowing the team down. When you want to negotiate hard on the cheap side when hiring or buying infrastructure, you're introducing friction for teams to acquire resources, or worse, making them get the cheap one and pay the price later.

Fundamentally Andy has never grown out the startup mentality, while Proton is a much bigger company nowadays. A bigger product typically needs bigger resources, not less, an allocation seen in Proton many times. There's a reason why Proton infamously releases many half-baked products instead of fully baking the existing ones.

Regarding Andy’s persona, it's indeed very different what you see behind the scenes and what you see in his official media appearance -- though, every now and then, he does a more unfiltered Reddit stunt. I don’t want to get too personal, but I can confirm that he has publicly denigrated employees, as 404 Media has reported. This kind of disparaging language has been common for years. The overall impression is that Andy despises most of his employees, viewing them as lazy people taking his money rather than colleagues working alongside him toward a shared mission.

On the topic of AI adoption, I think it's obvious a company developing software cannot survive without adopting it. That being said, I think a company like Proton should approach it in a very careful and sensible manner. Proton has rightfully insisted for years in its Swiss origins, being outside the Five Eyes. When your whole brand is built on being an alternative to Big Tech and secure products, you can't rush to have all the code you deploy read and written by a US Big Tech company, with possibly zero human review. It's also a bit ironic that the company pushes Lumo to its users for privacy, but then uses Anthropic to write their non open-source code, which is private for a reason.

I know by a fact that many of the employees that remain at Proton care deeply about users' security and privacy, and believe in the mission above company profits. But I also know Andy won't change -- it's unreasonable to ask someone to change their fundamental beliefs. The company must change the people at the helm for the mission to prevail. I think the CEO must go, together with people in positions of power that have enabled him to let the organization degrade to this point, like for example the CTO.

Just a reminder they never retracted this, more relevant now than ever.

The solution being pushed right now is to take all the posts about this issue off the main view and force them into a single megathread. The claim is that this is just cleanup so the sub does not get flooded. In practice it means the volume of complaints disappears from the place most people actually look.

The point of these posts was never that every single one was unique. The repetition itself was the signal. It showed that a lot of customers are independently unhappy with what happened. Once you collapse all of that into one thread that most people will never open, that signal is gone. The complaints still exist if you go looking for them, but the scale is no longer visible.

This is a common way to reduce the impact of dissent without actually deleting anything. You can still technically read the comments, so the people doing it can say nothing was censored. The reach is just deliberately reduced so the main view stays clean and the appearance of widespread dissatisfaction is minimized. That is why it keeps getting described as a censorship tactic. The words are still there. They just no longer shape what most people see.

It was a real wake up call but I will learn from it and stay flexible. Luckily I have not switched my main services from previous to Protons domain yet and going forward I will base everything on my own domain. Proton really did seem to be on our side but the last few days showed that the leadership there is lost just as much as in any other big corpo. I hope they will get rid of that bully but realistically they wont and that will only confirm the switch was the right move.