Proton CEO Andy Yen projects a calm persona and rails against Big Tech and critiques AI. Internally, he is pushing engineers to build Proton with AI, even when they have security concerns.
Happy to answer actually, since the quote above was taken out of context. Proton today does way more security reviewing than we have done at any time in the past. With the proliferation of AI tools, our code is also under more third party scrutiny than ever before. We see this across the industry, with critical software bugs (like the recent PHP bug) being found on an almost daily basis. However, several extra days of human review is not the correct way to confront this challenge. We still have human review, but now augmented by AI, has become exceptionally good at finding vulnerabilities in code. For some time now, Proton has also been using unaligned models with custom skills to do a thorough review of our code. This approach is better, and also faster.
It’s funny, 404 gets that “out of context” line all the time from public figures the report on. They always reach ahead of publication asking if they want to comment, so it can appear in the article. They provide context in their article. So far, 404 has shown themselves to be orders of magnitude more trustworthy than Andy Yen / Proton.
PS: Andy has partially responded to article in the ProtonMail subreddit. He has alleged that 404 took his comment about security out of context and offered absolutely zero context or explanation about that “Calling his employees losers” bit.
Here’s his full comment:
It’s funny, 404 gets that “out of context” line all the time from public figures the report on. They always reach ahead of publication asking if they want to comment, so it can appear in the article. They provide context in their article. So far, 404 has shown themselves to be orders of magnitude more trustworthy than Andy Yen / Proton.