Proton cancels AI 're-interviews' for staff but keeps its AI push
CEO Andy Yen said he's "still going to push," and one employee says AI use will now count in performance reviews instead.
Proton CEO Andy Yen on Friday (Oct. 30) canceled a nearly company-wide round of "re-interviews" that would have made employees explain how they use AI at work, according to 404 Media, which cited six current employees and audio of a roughly two-hour all-hands meeting.
The reversal came four days after 404 Media first reported the plan. An internal email called the interviews "consequential" and said they "may lead to changes in roles, responsibilities, and continued employment," The Verge reported.
"We've decided to actually cancel the re-interviews," Yen said in the meeting, adding that "in a, let's say, unintentional way, they have actually already served their purpose." He also said: "Going forward, I'm still going to push."
What isn't clear yet is how much AI use will count from here. One employee told 404 Media that what the re-interviews were meant to measure "would become a component of the performance reviews." Proton hasn't said publicly how that will work, and it did not respond to 404 Media's request for comment on Friday.
What the re-interviews were supposed to do
The Swiss company behind Proton Mail had planned to run the sessions from Nov. 4 to 11, The Next Web reported. Not every employee would have been called in.
Interviewers were to come from outside each employee's team, drawn from a pool of leaders who "demonstrate strong AI capability," and Yen had started by interviewing more than 40 senior engineering and product leaders.
Backlash grew after a Thursday (Oct. 29) 404 Media investigation based on eight current and one former employee, Slack chats, meeting recordings, and an AI manifesto from CTO Bart Butler.
In one Slack exchange from late August, an employee asked for a few days to pentest new code before it went live. Yen replied: "That's bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it's possible to be fast and secure." He told the team to "stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more."
The investigation also reported that Proton installed software on employees' computers to track how much code AI generates, and that Yen said this is the last year Proton will hire engineers at all, with future hires focused on building things with AI.
Butler's manifesto told engineers, "Your old job is gone." Butler said in a meeting that AI wrote 90 percent of Proton's code in October, according to TNW, citing audio obtained by 404 Media.
A Proton spokesperson didn't dispute the Thursday reporting. "In our determination to move fast, we have sometimes been too blunt or too slow in explaining ourselves to our people," the spokesperson told 404 Media.
What changes for Proton's engineers
At Friday's meeting, Yen called the episode "a communication failure on my part." He said Proton will reorganize next month and is "redistributing talent across teams," but that "there will be no loss of jobs from AI."
Earlier in the week, Proton said on Reddit that it wasn't using AI as an excuse for layoffs and was still hiring, TNW reported, citing TechRadar.
Butler told staff that Yen "needs to, and he has committed to, doing better" in how he communicates. "Using AI effectively and pragmatically does not mean that we've given up on security, or good architecture, or sound software engineering principles," Butler said.
Employees were split. One told 404 Media they "would have preferred real accountability from the leadership team," while another said they were "mostly happy with how this was addressed."
Proton's fight lands in a tense month for tech workers. Microsoft this week offered a voluntary exit package to up to 60,000 employees, Fortune reported.
In the job market, senior roles drove 71 percent of the growth in US software postings between May 2025 and May 2026, and AI-titled jobs drove 37 percent, according to Indeed Hiring Lab data cited by CNBC. We've covered the same squeeze from the hiring side in Anthropic's falling share of junior tech hires.
For Proton engineers, the next marker is the reorganization Yen promised for November, and whether AI-use metrics show up in their next review.
