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

Wired has a terrific, long-form interview with Proton founder and CEO Andy Yen that’s worth reading. Or listening to, as you can hear it in podcast form (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc.) as well.

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.