Proton’s CEO is in full AI psychosis mode (404 Media):

Yen set up an email address for employees to contact if they come across anything blocking adoption of AI at Proton, so leadership can “ruthlessly smash everything that stands in the way of AI velocity;” Proton installed software on workers’ computers that track how much AI code the company is generating; and Yen said this is the last year that Proton will hire engineers at all, and instead only hire people to build things with AI.

Insanely, after that piece blew up the internet, Proton’s response was to post CTO Bart Butler’s maligned internal AI manifesto directly to their public blog:

Your job has fundamentally changed. It is no longer to write code, and LLMs are not here to help you write better code faster. Your job is to help the LLM write better code faster. Every engineer is now a team leader, a manager, and your direct reports are the models and agents you use.

This is cartoonishly awful judgment! Proton is not being run by serious people!

Frustratingly, we’ve built our publishing business on their platform, explicitly because of their zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption. We’ve got authors submitting their unpublished work to us for consideration, and it’s important that that work isn’t exposed to data breaches, AI training, etc. But that security promise is only worth as much as it continues to be invested with expert human attention. AI slop is inherently untrustworthy and unreliable, and if trust goes out the window, so does Proton’s entire value proposition.

So we’re left in a quandary. We could migrate somewhere else—lots of folks are currently canceling their Proton subscriptions over this—but the most commonly cited alternatives aren’t any better¹:

• Tuta has embraced slop (GitHub)

• FastMail are union busters (Archive)

• NextCloud is laden with AI (NextCloud]

Not that jumping ship is even a sustainable answer. The round-robin game of migrating from service to service as each repeats the same harmful patterns costs a ton of time and energy that could (and should) be funneled into more fulfilling pursuits.

When migration stops being a viable solution, the only option left is to try to fix things where you are.

Proton’s UserVoice is currently overrun with requests to oust Andy Yen. I voted for this one, which had by far the most activity, and posted this comment:

Our whole business runs on Proton explicitly because of the privacy promise, but you can't guarantee privacy if you treat your employees like pearl-clutching idiots and turn your product into vibe-coded slopware.

Security is about trust, and trust is fundamentally human. This narcissistic tech bro bullshit is anathema to that.

Andy needs to go.

Will they care? It’s doubtful, but the only way to be sure to accomplish nothing is to do nothing. Making your voice heard is at least a start. If you’re also a Proton user, go add your upvote and, if you’re comfortable, a comment of your own, then share that link with others.

One of the big advantages of non-corporate, publicly-owned, and fully open-source platforms is that you have a lot more power to fix things directly. Unfortunately, I’m not currently aware of any such platform for business email and data that is also competitive on security and features and not completely AI-slopped. Let me know if you know of one, or of anyone who’s building one!

Ultimately, the durable solutions here are systemic and political: we need legislation and enforcement to stamp out this AI trash and to prioritize and protect data security, personal privacy, and digital sovereignty. Regrettably, history has shown us the so-called “free market” system of capitalism isn’t up to that task.