Proton CEO says this is the last year it will hire engineers

Proton engineers were informed by CEO Andy Yen that 2026 will be the last year the Swiss privacy company hires engineers.

The comments attributed to Yen became public knowledge after Slack messages and a manifesto circulated internally confirmed the company’s aggressive push to adopt AI.

Proton offers different privacy products, including a VPN, Proton Mail, an encrypted drive, a password manager and the Lumo AI assistant.

Proton CEO calls out developers’ ‘bullshit and loser thinking’

Proton’s decision to move on from human developers was first covered by 404 Media in a report that cited Slack logs, meeting recordings and an internal manifesto, along with nine people who either have worked or are currently employed by the company.

Per 404 Media, Yen rejected a late August request from a developer who asked for a few days to check new code before shipping it. The CEO reportedly replied in the company’s security Slack channel, writing, “That’s bullshit and loser thinking,” adding that “only losers think like that.”

Yen went further, directing staff to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”

Yen wrote in the same channel that “This will be the last year that we hire engineers.”

The 404 Media report also wrote that Yen set up an email address to help leadership “ruthlessly smash everything that stands in the way of AI velocity.”

AI developed 90% of Proton’s October code

In Proton’s November 1 engineering manifesto, chief technology officer Bart Butler doubled down on the position attributed to Yen in the 404 Media report, arguing that handwritten code is “a core skill whose time has passed.”

Butler compared writing code manually to memorizing phone numbers or riding horses, skills that became obsolete over time. “No one writes code in [business unit] anymore,” the CTO claimed a senior engineer told him.

Butler noted the shift within the company, with AI generating 90% of all the code Proton ran in October.

That change, according to Butler, is a matter of survival, calling it “an existential threat to the success of the mission itself” if the company fell behind on the new emerging technology.

404 Media noted that the wording is sharper internally, where the firm is seen as underperforming.

Proton has walked back some of its aggressive AI-led initiatives

Yen reportedly canceled re-interviews that Proton had planned between November 4 and 11 on October 30. Those sessions, which were planned to assess how employees were using AI, were supposed to be used to determine whether they would remain at the company or not.

The scrapped plans came with Yen telling staff that “I want to personally acknowledge that there was a communication failure on my part.”

“We screwed up, and we know it,” CTO Butler also acknowledged.

The official Proton account on X also apologized: “We know we have not lived up to the high standards you have every right to expect from us, and for that, we can only apologize. We are sorry.”

Media reports have noted Proton users protested Yen’s remarks by canceling subscriptions to the company’s services.

A wider wave of AI-driven cuts

Proton’s stance echoes moves elsewhere in tech. Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 employees, close to a quarter of its staff, while spending heavily on AI, Cryptopolitan reported.

Coinbase cut 700 jobs, about 14% of its workforce, in May as it shifted work toward AI agents and tested “one-person teams.” Butler’s manifesto noted that tech firms have shed more than a million jobs in recent years.