Andy Yen, CEO of Proton, warns that without privacy safeguards, AI technology could accelerate the surveillance economy. Proton is developing privacy-focused AI tools, emphasising user control and end-to-end encryption amid concerns over data exploitation by tech giants.
Andy Yen, the founder and chief executive of Proton, has cast artificial intelligence as a fresh stage in the long expansion of digital surveillance. In an interview with WIRED, he argued that AI does not merely sit alongside existing tracking systems; it can intensify them, drawing on vast datasets and encouraging people to place their most sensitive information into cloud-based services. Proton’s pitch is built around an opposite promise: end-to-end encryption across products that mirror major Google services, including email, documents, calendars and video calls.
Yen said his thinking was shaped by the Snowden disclosures in 2013 and by his earlier work as a particle physicist at CERN. He recalled that Proton was conceived during an upgrade period at the Large Hadron Collider, when researchers had more time away from active experiments. From there, he said, the central lesson was that state surveillance mattered, but that corporate data collection was the larger issue. As he put it in the WIRED interview, the amount of information available to large technology firms can far exceed what intelligence agencies hold.
That argument has been consistent across previous interviews. In remarks to CNBC, Yen described the advertising-driven business models of major technology companies as a form of surveillance capitalism, while Forbes reported that he has linked the same logic to the wider surveillance economy. More recently, the Daily Beast quoted him warning that AI without privacy safeguards amounts to surveillance capitalism “on overdrive”. The common thread is his view that privacy is not a niche feature, but a structural constraint on how digital products should be built.
Proton has nevertheless moved to adopt AI rather than reject it outright. According to WIRED, the company released a new version of its own chatbot, Lumo, in late June, presenting it as a privacy-preserving alternative to the default approach taken by larger platforms. That reflects Yen’s broader position: the issue is not whether AI should exist, but whether it is deployed voluntarily, with limits on data extraction and with users retaining meaningful control. In that framing, privacy and AI are not mutually exclusive, but the design choices around them determine whether the result is a tool or a tracking system.
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