Proton's CEO called a request to pentest new code "loser thinking" and told engineers to use AI more

404 Media reports that in late August an employee in Proton's security Slack channel asked for a few days to pentest newly written code before it shipped. CEO Andy Yen replied: "Of course it's possible to be fast and secure." He called the request "loser thinking" and told the team to "stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more." The report is based on eight current employees and one former employee, Slack messages, meeting recordings and an AI manifesto written by CTO Bart Butler. It also says Proton installed software that tracks how much AI code the company generates, and that Yen said this is the last year Proton hires engineers as such. A Proton spokesperson did not dispute the reporting, saying the company had "sometimes been too blunt."

A follow-up on October 30 reports that Yen cancelled planned staff "re-interviews" about AI use after the story ran. On an all-hands call he said he would keep pushing, and one employee told 404 Media that what the interviews were to measure would move into performance reviews. Butler said on the call that using AI "does not mean that we've given up on security." Part of the first article is behind a paywall and was not read, so the account above rests on the readable portion and the follow-up. All of it is one outlet's reporting from anonymous employees plus recorded and quoted statements.

Why it matters: The reported metric is volume of AI-written code, and the step that got pushed back was the one that checks it before release. If you are setting agent adoption targets, decide what the target rewards and whether review and security testing sit inside the delivery schedule or outside it, before someone has to argue for them in a channel.