Is Proton Still Safe After the AI Code Row?
What the Encryption Still Protects, What Rushed Code Could Break, and Who Should Stay

Last updated: 11 November 2026 · Author: Baizaar Lee · Primary sources: 404 Media’s reporting, Proton’s own statements of 30 October, 1 November and 10 November 2026, Proton’s transparency report, audit and bug bounty pages

BAIZAAR is a Proton affiliate and earns a commission if you subscribe through our links, at no extra cost to you. That’s exactly why this page tells you when we’d leave, and names alternatives that pay us nothing.

You pay Proton to be the sensible adult in charge of your inbox, and then its chief executive turns up in the news for calling a request to security-test new code “loser thinking”. Not ideal. Maybe you’ve spent the past fortnight wondering whether to cancel, renew, or shift your passwords somewhere else. This page works through what was reported, what Proton has said back, and what the encryption you pay for still does and doesn’t protect, app by app.

We’ve reviewed most of Proton’s apps on this site and we earn from some of them, so we’ve treated this like any other trust question: dates, sources, what’s proven, what isn’t, and what would make us change our minds.

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What happened at Proton? The AI row in six dates

Strip out the Reddit noise and the story fits on a postcard. A privacy company’s boss reportedly waved away a security check, staff talked to a journalist, and Proton spent the following fortnight explaining itself.

Date	What happened	Source
Late August 2026	In Proton’s security Slack channel, an employee asks for a few days to pentest new code before release. Andy Yen replies: “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure.”	404 Media
26 October	Staff are told about AI “re-interviews”, which the email says “may lead to changes in roles, responsibilities, and continued employment”. 404 Media reports it the same day.	404 Media, Proton on Reddit
29 October	404 Media publishes its investigation, built on eight current staff, one former member of staff, Slack chats and meeting recordings.	404 Media
30 October	The re-interviews are cancelled. Yen apologises on Reddit, and Proton says on X that its “use of AI will never be at the expense of security”.	Reddit, X
1 November	Proton publishes its CTO’s internal AI manifesto, which expects that “most human code review will end”.	Proton blog
10 November	Proton sets out how it reviews code: a person approves every change, and cryptography changes go to its crypto team.	Proton blog

Swipe the table sideways for the sources.

What the timeline doesn’t contain is a breach. As of 10 November 2026 nobody has reported Proton user data leaking because of AI-written code. 404 Media’s reporting is about how decisions get made inside the company, which matters a great deal, but it’s a different problem from a hole in your inbox.

The apology is worth reading in full if you’ve got five minutes. Yen wrote on Reddit that he takes “responsibility for the failure of communications”, said some of what he’d told staff was hurtful, and promised to publish how Proton reviews code and where AI is and isn’t allowed, though his post doesn’t mention the pentest exchange at all.

Which parts of the Proton story are confirmed, and which are still disputed?

A lot of what’s circulating is second-hand, and several of the loudest claims sit behind 404 Media’s paywall, so we’ve sorted them by how solid they are.

Claim	Status	What we know
Yen called a pentest request “loser thinking”	Confirmed	Quoted from internal Slack by 404 Media. Proton didn’t dispute the reporting.
Staff faced AI “re-interviews” that could cost them their jobs	Confirmed, then cancelled	Proton posted the staff email itself on 26 October and cancelled the interviews on 30 October.
The CTO expects most human code review to end	Confirmed	It’s in the manifesto Proton published on 1 November.
Yen said 2026 is the last year Proton hires engineers	Reported	Behind 404 Media’s paywall. Proton told Reddit on 26 October it was “actively hiring”.
AI wrote about 90% of October’s code	Reported	Attributed to the CTO from meeting audio. Proton hasn’t published a figure.
Proton tracks how much AI code staff produce	Disputed	Proton denies it and puts the claim down to a misunderstanding about device-management software.
Users are cancelling in large numbers	Unknown	Plenty of people say they have. No figures exist, from Proton or anyone else.
User data was exposed	None reported	Nothing as of 10 November 2026.

Swipe the table sideways for the third column.

One quote that’s doing the rounds, a CTO line along the lines of “we screwed up”, has no primary source we could find, so we’ve left it out. Treat anything you can’t trace back to 404 Media or Proton itself with some suspicion, because a fair bit of the coverage is copying other coverage.

Who runs Proton, and who can hold Andy Yen to account?

Andy Yen co-founded Proton in 2014 and is its chief executive, but he doesn’t own it outright. The non-profit Proton Foundation is Proton’s largest voting shareholder, and Proton says no change of control can happen without its consent.

Readers on Hacker News spotted the snag within hours. Yen also sits on the Foundation‘s five-person board of trustees, alongside Antonio Gambardella (its president, according to the Swiss company register), the philosopher Carissa Véliz, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Dingchao Lu, so the body that would judge the chief executive includes the chief executive. As of 10 November the Foundation hadn’t said anything in public about the row.

Customers tried their own route. A UserVoice idea asking Yen to step down reached 2,457 votes on 7 November and has since stopped being publicly viewable. Proton hasn’t said why, though on 9 November it closed similar ideas on the grounds that UserVoice is for product feature requests.

This isn’t Yen’s first public row, either. In December 2024 he praised a Trump cabinet pick on X, Proton’s official Reddit account then weighed in on US politics in January 2025, and Yen later said the post shouldn’t have been made and that Proton would stay politically neutral. Our page on who owns Proton Mail covers the ownership structure in more detail.

Can AI-written code break Proton’s encryption? It depends which code

Code running on Proton’s servers can’t read what’s end-to-end encrypted, however it was written. The apps on your phone and the web app in your browser are another matter, because they’re the code doing the encrypting.

Proton’s design keeps the keys to your email, files and passwords on your own devices, so the copy sitting on its servers is scrambled ciphertext. A sloppy server update hits that wall. So does a nosy member of staff, and so does a court order. Proton put it plainly on 10 November, “We do not hold the keys to your emails, files, or passwords, so we cannot read them”, and that part of its argument holds up.

Where it gets less comfortable is the client. Encryption happens inside Proton’s own apps. A badly reviewed change to the Mail app, the Pass browser extension or the shared cryptography library could in principle leak a key or a message before it’s ever encrypted. No amount of clever server design rescues you from a bug that sits on your own machine.

The web app is the softest spot. Proton serves its JavaScript fresh every time you open mail.proton.me, so one bad deploy reaches every browser user at once. Proton has accepted for years that web apps give weaker guarantees than installed ones, and its own threat model describes an attacker who could send “bad encryption code to users’ browsers”. Desktop and mobile apps from the official stores are signed releases, which makes them much harder to swap without somebody noticing.

Some things were never end-to-end encrypted in the first place. Proton’s privacy policy says it can see sender and recipient addresses, subject lines and send times. Email arriving from Gmail or Outlook lands readable and is encrypted for storage on arrival. Lumo, Proton’s AI assistant, has to decrypt your prompt on Proton’s servers to answer it, as its security model admits. None of that changed in October, it’s just easy to forget when every page of the marketing says “encrypted”, and our page on what Proton Mail does not encrypt lists the lot.

So is Proton still safe with AI writing more of its code? The row matters exactly where AI-written code touches the apps and the crypto library, and Proton’s reply, that a human approves every change and its cryptography team reviews every change to the crypto code, is the right reply to give. For now it’s also only Proton’s word, because outsiders can’t watch the review process and no new independent audit has been announced.

What evidence says Proton is still safe? Audits, court orders and open code

Quite a lot, as it goes, though most of it predates the row.

Evidence	Detail	Date
Proton Pass audit	Recurity Labs tested the browser extensions, mobile, desktop and command-line apps, and rated them “well above par”	Published 12 May 2026
Proton VPN no-logs audit	Securitum, the fifth annual no-logs audit in a row	May 2026
Proton Mail and Calendar web apps	Securitum audit	2021
Proton Drive mobile apps	Securitum audit	2022, published March 2023
Company controls	ISO 27001 certified, plus a SOC 2 Type II audit by Schellman. The next SOC 2 audit is due in 2027	May 2024 and July 2025
Open-source apps	Every Proton client app has public code on GitHub. The server code isn’t published	Checked 10 November 2026
Bug bounty	Up to $100,000 for a critical flaw, run in-house. Meet and Sheets aren’t in scope	Unchanged since September 2026
Mail legal orders	9,301 orders in 2025: 8,313 complied with, 988 contested	Transparency report
VPN legal orders	59 orders in 2025, all 59 refused, because there were no logs to hand over	Transparency report

Swipe the table sideways for the dates.

Two gaps stand out. We couldn’t find an independent audit for Lumo, Wallet, Meet, Authenticator or Docs, even though Proton says all its apps have been audited, and nothing new has been commissioned since the row. ISO 27001 and SOC 2 check how a company runs itself, which is useful, but neither of them reads a line of its code.

The 8,313 figure looks alarming at first glance and needs a sentence of context. Complying with a Swiss order means handing over what Proton holds about an account, such as a recovery email, payment details, or an IP address if a court orders Proton to start logging one. It can’t hand over the contents of an encrypted mailbox, because it can’t read them, and that’s the whole point of the transparency report being dull.

Has Proton handed user data to the police before?

Yes, three times that made headlines, and each time it was information around the account that went, with the messages themselves untouched.

• 2021, a French climate activist. A binding Swiss order made Proton log the IP address of one account, which reached French police through Europol. Proton said there was no way to appeal, and dropped the line about keeping no IP logs from its homepage.
• 2024, a Catalan activist. Spanish police, working through the Swiss authorities, got the account’s recovery email, which was an iCloud address. Apple then supplied a name and two home addresses.
• 2026, Stop Cop City. 404 Media reported in March that Proton gave Swiss authorities payment data for an account, which ended up with the FBI.

The lesson from all three is unglamorous. Proton protects what you write, and Swiss law decides what happens to everything around it, so anyone with a serious threat model should skip the recovery email, pay in a way that isn’t tied to their name, and connect through a VPN or Tor. Our guide to whether police can track Proton Mail goes through it step by step.

So is Proton still safe for Mail, VPN, Pass, Drive and Lumo?

The AI row lands differently on each app, depending on how much of your security rests on Proton’s client code and how much on maths Proton can’t touch.

App	What protects you	Where the row bites	Our call
Proton Mail	End-to-end encryption between Proton users, zero-access storage for everything else	The web app’s code is served fresh on every visit. Subjects and senders were never end-to-end encrypted	Safe for everyday use. Use the desktop or mobile app for anything sensitive
Proton VPN	Audited no-logs policy, and 59 of 59 legal orders refused in 2025	App updates, like any VPN	Safe. The row barely touches it
Proton Pass	Vault encrypted on your device, audited by Recurity Labs in 2026	The browser extension sits on every page you fill in	Safe, but keep a current export
Proton Drive	End-to-end encrypted files and open-source apps	Client code, as with Mail	Safe for everyday files
Lumo	Saved chats are zero-access encrypted	Prompts are decrypted on Proton’s servers, and there’s no independent audit	Keep anything you’d hate to see leaked out of it

Swipe the table sideways for our call on each app.

If email is your main worry, our page on whether Proton Mail is safe goes deeper into the encryption itself. The VPN side gets the same treatment in is Proton VPN safe, and the audit history is in our page on Proton VPN audits.

New to Proton and leaning towards one app? Each has a Black Friday price for new users, Mail Plus, Pass Plus and Proton Unlimited for a year or VPN Plus for two, and our price table shows what each renews at.

Should you stay with Proton or leave? It comes down to who you’re hiding from

Your threat model, a grand phrase for who you’re worried about and what they could do, decides this far more than any headline does.

Everyday privacy (most people reading this)

Stay. If you came to Proton to get away from Google reading your email for adverts, nothing in October changes that, because the encryption that keeps advertisers and data brokers out is intact and still audited. Fix the basics in the next section and get on with your life.

Proton runs your whole digital life

Hedge. Mail, passwords, files and VPN all with one company was already a concentration risk before any of this, and the row is a decent nudge to make sure you could leave in an afternoon if you ever had to. Most of it takes about half an hour. The only part that can cost money is your own domain, which needs a domain name and a paid plan.

Small businesses

Hedge, and ask questions. Proton has a SOC 2 Type II report from July 2025, and business customers can reasonably ask for it, along with the AI policy Proton promised to publish on 30 October.

Journalists, activists and anyone protecting a source

Start planning a move now, or at least split your services. Your risk sits in exactly the places the row touches, client code you can’t verify and a company whose security culture is under question, and the three police cases above show how much metadata matters to you in particular. Alternatives worth a look include Tuta for email, which encrypts subject lines and uses post-quantum encryption by default, Mailbox.org, Signal for messages, Mullvad or IVPN for a VPN, and Bitwarden or KeePassXC for passwords. None of them pays BAIZAAR a penny.

For what it’s worth, Privacy Guides, the volunteer project plenty of people treat as the referee on this sort of thing, hadn’t changed its Proton recommendations as of 10 November, and a team member said on its forum that the news didn’t change that “right now”.

How to stay with Proton without putting all your eggs in one basket

If you’re staying, and most people reading this probably should, a few changes make leaving cheap later, which is the best insurance you can buy against any company, Proton included.

1. Use your own domain for email. Mail sent to [email protected] can follow you to another provider in an afternoon. It needs a paid plan, and Mail Plus includes one custom domain.
2. Export your mail every few months. Proton’s Mail Export Tool saves everything as standard EML files. Download it from proton.me and nowhere else, because cloned copies of Proton’s help pages have turned up in search results.
3. Export Proton Pass as well. It works from the web app, the browser extension or the Windows app (the phone apps can’t do it), and you can pick a PGP-encrypted file. Keep it offline. If you ever do move your passwords, our comparison of the most secure password managers covers where they could go.
4. Use the installed apps for anything sensitive. Signed desktop and mobile apps are far harder to tamper with than the web app.
5. Switch on two-factor authentication, with a hardware security key if you’ve got one. Phishing and reused passwords remain a far likelier way into your account than anything in this story. On Pass Plus or Proton Unlimited you can add Proton Sentinel as well, Proton’s stricter protection against suspicious sign-ins.
6. Turn on post-quantum encryption in Settings if you want it. Proton made it an opt-in setting in May 2026, and it only covers new mail.
7. Undecided, with a renewal coming up? Cancel before the renewal date. Proton’s help pages say a cancelled plan keeps running until the end of the period you’ve paid for, so you decide on the evidence instead of a deadline.

That last one costs Proton nothing if it keeps earning your trust, and it costs you nothing if it doesn’t. Fair enough all round.

Leaving after all? How to cancel Proton, and when you get a refund

Sign in at account.proton.me, open Settings, then All settings, then Subscription, and pick Cancel subscription (Proton sets out the steps here). You’ll be asked to confirm twice, and Proton VPN also wants a reason before the cancellation goes through.

Whether you get money back depends on timing. Proton’s terms give a full refund if you cancel and ask for it within 30 days of your first purchase, once per account, for plans bought from Proton itself. After that there’s no cash refund. Proton’s help pages say a cancelled plan keeps running until the end of the period you’ve paid for and then stops, though Proton also says it’s still moving every plan over to that rule, so read the confirmation screen before you click.

Subscribed through Apple’s App Store? Then the refund is Apple’s to give, through its Report a Problem page. Google Play subscribers can ask Proton’s support team, or try Google Play’s own refund request.

Dropping to the free plan doesn’t delete anything straight away. Go over the free limits (500 MB of mail storage, which you can raise to 1 GB), though, and you can’t receive mail from outside Proton or upload to Drive until you’re back under them. Proton says data still over the limit after 12 months could be deleted. Export first.

UK law gives you 14 days to cancel most online service contracts under the Consumer Contracts Regulations, though Which? warns those rights are often hard to enforce against a company based abroad, and Proton is Swiss.

Thinking of joining Proton? What it costs this Black Friday

Most of this page is written for people who already pay Proton. If you’re weighing it up for the first time, the row belongs in the decision, and so does the price, which Proton bills as its best of the year through partner offers like ours.

Plan	Black Friday price (new users)	Then renews at
Mail PlusEncrypted email, 15 GB, 10 addresses, 1 custom domain	£1.59 ($1.99) a month for 12 monthsbilled £19.08 ($23.88)	£38.28 ($47.88) a year
Pass PlusUnlimited logins, hide-my-email aliases, built-in 2FA codes, Dark Web Monitoring	£1.59 ($1.99) a month for 12 monthsbilled £19.08 ($23.88)	£28.68 ($35.88) a year
VPN Plus10 devices at once, servers in 140+ countries, ad and malware blocker	£1.99 ($2.49) a month for 24 monthsbilled £47.76 ($59.76)	£67.08 ($83.88) a year
Proton UnlimitedMail, Pass, VPN, Drive and Calendar, 500 GB storage	£5.19 ($6.49) a month for 12 monthsbilled £62.28 ($77.88)	£95.88 ($119.88) a year

We’ve put the renewal price next to every deal on purpose. A first-year discount that doubles when it renews is normal in this business, and you should know the second-year figure before you pay the first.

What would make us change our answer on Proton?

Is Proton still safe next month? We’ll keep checking, and we’ll update this page and say so at the top if any of these happens:

• Proton, or anyone else, discloses a security flaw that reached users.
• Proton doesn’t publish the AI policy it promised on 30 October, the one setting out where AI is and isn’t allowed.
• The next independent audit of Mail, Pass or the VPN slips, or comes back worse.
• Senior security or cryptography staff leave in numbers.
• Proton lets AI review AI-written code with no human sign-off, as its CTO’s memo expects.
• Privacy Guides drops its Proton recommendations.

Changelog. 11 November 2026: first published, covering events up to 10 November 2026, including Proton’s security post of 10 November.

Is Proton still safe? Quick answers

What is the Proton Mail scandal?

Usually people mean the October 2026 row, when 404 Media reported that chief executive Andy Yen called a request to pentest new code “loser thinking” and pushed staff hard towards AI-written code. Earlier stories include the 2021 IP logging of a French activist, a 2024 recovery-email disclosure in Spain and Yen’s 2024 political post on X.

Why are people leaving Proton Mail?

Mostly over trust in Proton’s leadership after the AI row, and a worry that faster AI-assisted coding means less security checking. Some are also unhappy about Proton’s wider push into AI. No figures on how many have left exist.

Has Proton been hacked because of AI-written code?

No breach has been reported. As of 10 November 2026 there’s no public evidence that any Proton user data leaked because of AI-written code. Our page on whether Proton Mail has been hacked covers its record.

How secure is AI-generated code?

Not very, if nobody checks it. Veracode tested AI coding models in 2026 and found that roughly 44% of tasks produced code with a risky security flaw, barely better than a year earlier. An earlier Stanford study found developers using an AI assistant wrote less secure code and felt more confident about it. So the question for Proton is less how much code AI writes and more whether someone who understands security reviews all of it.

Is Proton still Swiss?

Its headquarters are still in Geneva. Since July 2025 Proton has been moving most of its physical infrastructure into the EU, starting with Lumo, because of proposed Swiss surveillance rules that hadn’t been adopted as of November 2026.

How safe is Lumo, Proton’s AI?

Safer than most chatbots for storage, because saved chats are zero-access encrypted. Your prompt is decrypted on Proton’s servers so the model can answer it, though, and we found no independent audit, so keep genuinely sensitive material out of it.

Can hackers get into Proton Mail?

The usual way in is your password, through phishing or reuse, so two-factor authentication matters far more than anything in the AI story. Researchers have found and reported bugs in Proton’s apps before, which Proton fixed, but we know of no case where its encryption itself was broken.

What are the downsides of Proton Mail?

Subject lines, sender and recipient addresses and send times aren’t end-to-end encrypted, as our page on what Proton Mail does not encrypt explains. Using Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail needs Proton Mail Bridge, which only comes with a paid plan. Searching the text of your emails means building an index on your own device, which is off by default, and the free plan is tight, with 500 MB of storage (up to 1 GB) and 150 sent messages a day.

Does Privacy Guides still recommend Proton?

Yes, as of 10 November 2026. A team member said on its forum that the news didn’t change its recommendations for now.

Should I cancel my Proton subscription?

Not in a hurry, for most people. If you’re undecided, cancel before the renewal date, because Proton says a cancelled plan keeps running until the end of the period you’ve paid for. If you’re an activist, a journalist or protecting a source, start planning a move to services you can verify more independently.

How do I cancel Proton and get a refund?

Sign in at account.proton.me and go to Settings, All settings, Subscription, then Cancel subscription. Cancel and ask for a refund within 30 days of your first purchase and Proton’s terms promise the full amount back, once per account. After that there’s no cash refund. If you subscribed through the App Store, the refund comes from Apple.

Is there a Proton Black Friday deal in 2026?

Yes, for new users. On 10 November 2026 Proton’s partner offers had Mail Plus and Pass Plus at £1.59 ($1.99) a month for the first year, and Proton Unlimited at £5.19 ($6.49). VPN Plus was £1.99 ($2.49) a month on a two-year plan. Every plan has a 30-day money-back guarantee, and each renews at its standard price after the first term.

Is Proton owned by Andy Yen?

No. Its largest voting shareholder is the non-profit Proton Foundation. Yen is the chief executive and one of the Foundation’s five trustees.

Is Proton VPN still safe after the AI row?

Yes. Its no-logs policy was audited again in 2026, and in 2025 Proton refused all 59 legal orders for VPN data because it had nothing to hand over.

Did Andy Yen apologise?

Yes, on Reddit on 30 October 2026. He said he takes responsibility for “the failure of communications” and that some of what he’d said to staff was hurtful. His post didn’t address the pentest remark directly.

How we verified this

Every answer to “is Proton still safe” on this page rests on sources we could check for ourselves. Between 29 October and 10 November 2026 we read the free parts of 404 Media’s three reports and Proton’s own posts on Reddit (26 and 30 October), X (30 October) and its blog (1 and 10 November). We also went through Proton’s transparency report, audit pages, open-source page and bug bounty page, the Swiss company register entry for the Proton Foundation, and the Privacy Guides and Hacker News threads. Claims that only appear behind 404 Media’s paywall are marked as reported, and quotes we couldn’t trace to a primary source are left out.

We haven’t audited Proton’s code ourselves, and nobody outside the company can audit its servers. BAIZAAR is a Proton affiliate. Proton didn’t see this page before publication and had no say in what it says.

Sources

• Manifestos, Fear, and ‘Loser Thinking’: Inside Proton’s AI Reckoning, 404 Media, 29 October 2026.
• Proton’s CEO Cancels AI ‘Re-Interviews’, 404 Media, 30 October 2026.
• A message to the community, Andy Yen on r/ProtonMail, 30 October 2026.
• Proton statement on X, 30 October 2026.
• Proton’s AI manifesto for software engineering, Proton blog, 1 November 2026.
• How Proton keeps your data secure in the age of AI, Proton blog, 10 November 2026.
• Transparency report, Proton. Source for the 2025 Mail and VPN legal order figures.
• Proton Pass 2026 security audit and Proton VPN no-logs audit, Proton.
• Open source at Proton and Proton bug bounty, Proton.
• Proton Foundation and Proton non-profit foundation announcement, Proton.
• Proton Mail threat model and Lumo security model, Proton.
• Encrypted services Apple, Proton and Wire helped Spanish police identify activist, TechCrunch, 8 May 2024.
• Proton Mail helped FBI unmask anonymous Stop Cop City protestor, 404 Media, March 2026.
• Will the recent Proton news affect recommendations?, Privacy Guides forum.
• Proton terms of service (last modified 5 November 2026), managing your subscription, free plan limits and Proton Sentinel, Proton.
• 2026 GenAI Code Security Report, Veracode, 28 July 2026, and Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?, Perry and others, Stanford University, 2022.

Related BAIZAAR guides

• Is Proton Mail safe?
• Is Proton VPN safe?
• Who owns Proton Mail?
• Can police track Proton Mail?
• What Proton Mail does not encrypt
• Proton Mail Plus review 2026
• Proton Unlimited review 2026