- Proton says it will not ‘re-interview’ some employees about how they use AI.
- The company promises “use of AI will never be at the expense of security”.
- Proton CTO publishes internal AI manifesto on company blog.
Privacy-first software provider Proton appears to have rolled back on a decision to re-interview staff members about their AI use, after admitting that it hadn’t “lived up to the high standard you ought to hold us to” in an announcement on social media.
The Swiss-based company outlined three promises to its community, which includes users of Proton Mail and Proton VPN, in a reaction to the leaked story that AI will be forced through the company with threats of job losses should staff not comply.
Alongside stating that it would not, in fact, re-interview staff and that there would be no AI-use related job losses, Proton also promised that its “use of AI will never be at the expense of security” and that it “does not install tracking software on employees’ laptops to measure how much AI-generated code they produce”.
In the statement on X, Proton also promised to publicly release and open source several of its internal tools as well as publish how code reviews and security reviews are done, to provide transparency and evidence that it delivers on its word.
The announcement comes alongside a wave of support from current staff members on Reddit and X all outing themselves by name and refuting much of what the initial leaked email had stated. Although many commenters on these platforms have suggested that this could instead be part of a coordinated PR response.
Proton’s AI manifesto
What is certain is the company’s commitment to using AI to drive itself forward. On Sunday 1 November, two days after the leak story was published, Proton CTO Bart Butler published the details of a company memo on AI use, the “AI @ Proton, Engineering Manifesto” which he had sent round to staff a month before the incident.
In it, Butler makes Proton’s position on how its software engineers should be using AI crystal clear.
“Your job has fundamentally changed. It is no longer to write code, and LLMs are not here to help you write better code faster,” he writes in bold. “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.”
Perhaps not a huge leap, then, to thinking that there might well have been some credence in the leaked reports on staff re-interviews given how important and specific this requested use of AI was, regardless of whether or not jobs may or may not have been on the line.
Butler continues later in the manifesto, which you can download and read in full here, by underlining his vision of the importance of his staff and where their value lies.
“This is not the death of expertise. The LLM is fast. You are slow, but you carry with you a lifetime of experience, judgment calls, and understanding.”
While that might be comforting to those engineers with that lifetime of experience, it might make harder reading for graduates looking for their first jobs in the industry.
“Programming” is dead. Engineering is not
“It is also not the death of good engineering practices,” he continues. “Maintainability and velocity is better on well-architected codebases. Documentation and tests remain crucial.”
The manifesto finishes with a rallying cry that speaks to a changing world that Proton intends itself and its employees to keep up with.
“The bottom line is that we are in a new world. “Programming” is dead. Engineering is not, nor is expertise. Your old job is gone. Your new job as a builder will let you do more and have more impact than you ever have, if you seize the opportunity.”
While it’s not certain how heavy handed Proton had originally intended on being with this suggested audit of AI practices, its reactionary social media statement certainly speaks from a place of regret over some part of the matter. Whether that’s the treatment of its employees, the suggestion that product code might be less secure through the use of AI, or both, is hard to tell.
From a customer side, though, there is one other more solid and very interesting outcome: expect to see an improvement in Proton’s privacy-first AI, Lumo, sooner as a result.
As part of its promised transparency of internal tools, the company will lift the hood on “more advanced versions of Lumo with greater capabilities, which have never been made available outside of the company” – a handy distraction for the the rest of us while Proton fixes its in-house issues.
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dan.sung@futurenet.com (Dan Sung)
