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Proton does email and documents and a VPN and, ahaha, a chatbot. Proton’s pitch has always been security and privacy. That is their product.
Proton CEO Andy Yen has gone full chatbot — and it’s eaten his brain. [404, archive]
Here’s Yen on how much Proton engineers should test their code for security:
That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure.
… stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.
If you’ve ever coded anything where security is a requirement, I’d hope you’re boggling at that. But Yen has fully replaced his brain with a clockwork mouse:
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.
Employees have been leaking furiously to 404:
a culture of fear inside Proton, where many employees are hesitant to even mildly critique Yen’s views or discuss engineering problems.
… “The CEO is in full AI psychosis and has been for a while now,” one of the sources told 404 Media.
Privacy is merely a talking point for marketing. The internal concerns are velocity and revenue:
barreling ahead with AI as quickly as possible so it can achieve the explicit goal of more annual revenue.
One employee asked Yen: how do you keep security when you’re doing AI coding? Yen berated him:
The employee “is saying his usual bs of we can do it but we will be even slower than we are today and I’m saying only losers think like that,” Yen wrote, adding that workers should prompt “better.”
It can’t be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong!
In May, Proton announced a move to post-quantum encryption. That’s good! But it won’t re-encrypt older emails immediately. Now, that should be fine.
But Yen was really upset at one discussion on Reddit in particular. He told his staff to get on the socials and fix it: [Reddit, archive]
So go on there with your personal account and comment to set the record straight. Perception is more important than truth, the truth doesn’t matter if you don’t win on perception.
If you’ve ever been in an online discussion of Proton, you’ll have seen fanboys who post like weird shills. These may well have been literally Proton employees, shilling because their boss ordered them to.
Pivot to AI was calling out Proton’s AI nonsense as far back as July 2024. We got an earful from ardent Proton fans, some of who may not have been literally employees. Who knows? Amy and I look forward to their apologies. Any day now.
Trusting Proton is trusting an AI-addled CEO who is cutting any corner he can to save a buck. Security is job number three at best. Where do you go now for secure email?
For a long time, the answer was Proton’s main competitor, Tuta, formerly Tutanota.
Tuta does a lot of marketing opposing the idea of having AI anywhere near your email. For example, this one from 2024: [Mastodon, archive]
We’re not interested in diving into the AI or crypto hype. It is important to us as a company and as global citizens to put ethics above profit, that’s why we are not pursuing AI integration or built-in crypto features.
In Tuta’s 2025 user survey, only 3% wanted “an AI copilot.” [Tuta, archive]
Tuta regularly posts against the AI vendors. How to leave ChatGPT. Gemini invades your privacy and you should de-Google. Meta’s new Muse bot only wants your data. How to remove Copilot from Windows. [Mastodon; Mastodon; Tuta; Mastodon]
Tuta’s contribution policy for code is explicitly against AI: [Github, archive]
This project does not accept contributions or bug reports produced, in part or in full, with assistance of large language models (LLMs)/generative AI. Maintainers will close issues or delete comments without further explanation if they suspect that any part of the issue is generated.
Unfortunately, Tuta have started coding with a chatbot anyway. Someone asked about this on Tuta’s GitHub. Here’s their excuse: [GitHub, archive]
Internal use is different because whoever is committing LLM-assisted code takes full responsibility for it and is therefore staking their reputation on that code being good. Git blame will also still show their name.
Tuta used dislike for AI as a marketing point for years, they put a no-AI policy on their codebase — and then they went chatbot anyway.
Now Tuta’s acting surprised their paying customers see this as a rugpull.
What about that anti-AI contribution policy? [Mastodon, archive]
This is because we are in the exploring phase, and we haven’t decided if/how to use AI exactly. We need to get this evaluated first internally before we can update the contribution policy. I hope you understand.
Yeah, we understand. Why are they doing all of this? Here’s Hanna from Tuta: [Reddit, archive]
The goal of Tuta is to bring privacy to everyone and for that the Tuta apps must become much more feature-rich and competitive with Big Tech equivalents (eg Gmail).
Velocity and features again. Security is job number three. But don’t worry: [Mastodon, archive]
The current Tuta apps are built more than 99% without AI
Your security system is 99% not made of chocolate gear wheels!
A security company that uses chatbots for anything does not care about security. AI to get velocity is not compatible with security.
So who’s left? Fastmail are encouraging AI users with an MCP server. [Fastmail]
Also, Fastmail are union busters. They fired most of a union bargaining unit in 2024. Fastmail said this was just a restructuring. One that just happened to mostly fire the union organisers. Coincidence, I’m sure. [Mastodon, archive]
So David, who do I use for my email now, huh? I can’t advise you on secure email. I’m still living on GMail, who are a known evil.
But if you use a service, you’re trusting those guys. And you need to be ready to jump in a moment if they go bad.
Security is not a product you can buy in a box. It’s an ongoing process.
Or you could pivot to small rocks and twigs. It’ll be a lot less stress.
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