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

In the eyes of many privacy advocates, AI is just another surveillance technology . It supercharges online tracking and real-world spying tools, sifts through vast troves of everyone’s data to spit out its results, and then encourages users to share their deepest secrets and desires with a cloud-hosted large-language model. Surveillance capitalism made AI possible, and AI returns the favor by making surveillance more powerful and the businesses that run on it more data-rich and profitable than ever.

Andy Yen is among the most influential voices in the tech industry who equates AI with privacy invasion. He’s the founder and CEO of Proton, one of the world’s most popular encryption-focused tech companies. He says the push to integrate AI into every consumer tech product—whether people want it or not—is driving new users in droves to Proton’s products, which are, put simply, the end-to-end encrypted versions of every Google service from Gmail to Google Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and Meet.

Yet Yen is not anti-AI, he says, any more than he is anti-internet. In late June, Proton released the latest version of its very own AI chatbot, Lumo—just one way that Proton is integrating AI ever more deeply into its suite of tools, but seeking to do so in a way that’s more voluntary and preserves users’ privacy far more than the typical tech giant.

That willingness to embrace the apparent contradiction between AI and privacy is just one way in which Yen’s views don’t cut cleanly across party lines—from current US politics to the lessons of Edward Snowden’s leaks to the question of the best corporate structure for a tech company that’s not solely designed to maximize profit. You can read our conversation about all of it here or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ANDY GREENBERG: I want to start by asking about your background and the origin story of Proton. You’re a trained particle physicist. You worked at CERN, the nuclear research facility, but you were inspired by the leaks of Edward Snowden back in 2013 to create Proton, right?

ANDY YEN: I’m not actually a tech person or even an entrepreneur by training, so I really happened into this field a little bit by accident. I used to work at the Large Hadron Collider, which is a particle accelerator. It’s the largest in the world.

Yes. And what you may not know is that every once in a while, the accelerator gets turned off for upgrades, and these upgrades can take quite a bit of time.

So Proton was created in one of those upgrade cycles, where the physicists had a little bit more free time because the experiment wasn’t running, and they were upgrading it.