Can AI Coexist With Privacy? Proton’s Andy Yen Says It Will Have To

Proton founder and CEO Andy Yen said the company is seeing a surge of new users as people grow frustrated with AI being pushed into everyday products like Gmail, according to an interview published this month. Yen argued that AI, like the broader internet, is inherently a surveillance technology, and the key question is who will control that future. Proton, which offers end-to-end encrypted alternatives to Google’s suite of services, has grown to over a hundred million users since its launch.

Yen, a former particle physicist at CERN, said Proton was born during an upgrade cycle at the Large Hadron Collider in the summer after Edward Snowden’s leaks about government surveillance. He said the realization among physicists at the time was that corporate surveillance from companies like Google and Meta was a much bigger problem than government spying. That insight led to the creation of Proton as a response to an internet business model that records, shares, and monetizes user data by default.

Proton started with email, then expanded to calendar, file storage, and documents, effectively recreating Google’s Workspace without what Yen called the “creepy business model.” He said the company has dislodged about a hundred million people from Google’s ecosystem so far, though most use Proton’s free tier. The conversion rate to paid plans sits in the typical 1 to 3 percent range for freemium products, Yen noted.

In late June, Proton released the latest version of its AI chatbot, Lumo, integrating AI into its tools in a way Yen said is more voluntary and privacy-preserving than the approach of major tech companies. Yen said Proton is capitalizing on AI backlash by making it easier to switch, including a tool that automatically imports emails from Google in a few clicks. He acknowledged AI is not going away, saying the genie is out of the bottle.

Yen said he is not anti-AI, just as he is not anti-internet, and that the company’s mission is to build an internet where privacy is the default, not an add-on buried in menus. He also noted that the US government can routinely subpoena data from Google and Facebook, meaning corporate surveillance feeds state surveillance. Proton’s growth reflects a broader shift in public awareness about how major platforms make money from user data, he said.