CEO Andy Yen told staff in an internal Slack message that 2026 “will be the last year that we hire engineers.
” From next year, he wrote, the company will instead hire “what we used to call product managers, to build things with AI.” Proton, the Swiss company behind the encrypted email service Proton Mail, may stop hiring software engineers altogether after this year.
Yen made the remarks in the company’s security channel in late August, according to 404 Media, which spoke to eight current and one former employee and reviewed internal Slack chats and meeting audio. Chief technology officer Bart Butler said in a meeting that about 90% of the company’s code in October was written by AI, according to audio obtained by 404 Media.
Several employees said much of it is produced with Anthropic’s Claude, which Yen also tells staff to use. It told engineers their “old job is gone” and said most code at Proton should eventually be reviewed by AI rather than humans. In the same message, he predicted that by the end of the year most developers would stop programming and start writing specs for tests that AI would code and run. Proton is now preparing to re-interview staff about their AI use, and has warned that the outcome could decide who keeps their job. The shift is already visible in the codebase. Butler followed up with a self-described AI manifesto, posted on Slack on a Friday afternoon. Falling behind on AI, it argued, was an existential threat to the company’s mission.
On Monday, Proton emailed employees to say it would re-interview staff across the company between November 4 and 11. Yen had already interviewed more than 40 senior leaders across engineering and product. An internal document seen by 404 Media points to a commercial angle. ” The Swiss firm did not dispute 404 Media’s reporting.
When one employee suggested taking a few days to pentest new code before it went live, Yen called the idea “loser thinking” and told the team to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more. “These re-interviews are consequential,” the email read, adding that the assessments could lead to changes in roles, responsibilities and continued employment. It says the company is not on track to meet its annual recurring revenue target this year “due to insufficient velocity,” and describes Proton as underperforming by every metric that matters. Yen, though, told a senior employee in Slack that if he believed the move was financially driven and didn’t trust Yen’s word otherwise, Proton “might not be the place for you. Inside the company, the November interviews will show what his “last year” of engineering hires means for the ones already there.
It has also set up an email address for staff to flag anything blocking AI adoption, and installed software that tracks how much code AI is writing. Some engineers have pushed back on security. Another engineer warned that AI would not fix things on its own, since security sat low on the company’s list of priorities. Interviewers will come from outside the employee’s own team and reporting line. A spokesperson acknowledged that some staff are unhappy with the company’s direction and many are anxious, adding that leadership had sometimes been “too blunt or too slow in explaining ourselves. In public, Yen has pitched Proton’s AI work, including its Lumo chatbot, as a privacy-first answer to Big Tech. You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.