Can AI Coexist With Privacy? Proton CEO Says It Will Have To

14:14Andy Greenberg:This is why I didn't say end-to-end encryption. That's end-to-end protected, because it's not technically end-to-end encryption. But it's as you say, right? You can run the processing on the GPUs, but in a way that the rest of the pipeline that delivers the tokens to and from the GPU is not able to view it. And through using this secure execution environment, you can have a cryptographic guarantee, actually, that nobody else along the pipeline could actually look. So if you think about it, maybe the analogy is it's a way to safely pipeline your data and your requests to the GPUs and execute in the GPU in a way that no outside observer can look at what was sent to the GPU.

14:54Andy Greenberg:That's maybe the best simplified way to sort to explain it. And yeah, it's possible to do some of this already today, but there are certain, let's say, performance issues. It's still a little bit clunky. It doesn't have proper support across the entire stack. So yeah, I wouldn't say it's impossible, but it's going to get easier to do in the years to come as analogies, as libraries, as the infrastructure around this gets better and better.

15:19Andy Yen:Got it. Well, it is interesting, though, that people are already doing this today. Other products do use these trusted execution environments. They don't just promise not to look at your conversations, but you don't feel like that is up to snuff yet. Like it's not, doesn't have certain features. Like what is lacking? Why is Proton not using this now?

15:39Andy Greenberg:Well, first it's, it's, you have to re-architect essentially your entire platform in a way to do that. So it's, it's, let's say quite a bit of work. Also, when we put out Lumo last year, a year ago, this analogy for AI was a lot more immature, right? Then there's also the interfaces, with the GPUs themselves. So Proton is not running on a cloud. Actually, we run our own infrastructure. And so then your pipelining and the libraries that actually NVIDIA provides to do that have to be good, have to be stable. They have to be completely working. They have to be flushed out. They have to be making sure there's no security issues.

16:12Andy Greenberg:So the technology for me, like I said, it's almost mature, but we're probably in a better position to fully deploy it in, let's say, the next year or two. Okay. And so it's pretty close. And to be honest, it's pretty close. Some people are already doing it. But we have a bigger deployment environment. We have tens of millions of people using Lumo. We cannot move fast and break things, as Mark Zuckerberg would say. We have to do things in a more careful and more considerate way because we have all the security requirements that we have also to keep in mind as well.

16:41Andy Yen:Yeah, I mean, to be fair, I think people do trust Proton. That's why people switch to Proton. But the people who use Proton also have trust issues. They don't want to trust anyone. I mean, I think as anybody who uses cryptography, you don't want to believe a promise. You want to believe the math. So it's a very interesting commitment. I don't know if you're committing to it here that you will switch to...

17:00Andy Greenberg:Yeah, so we're committing to it. And actually, if you look at Lumo's security model, which is kind of published, you'll see that we've already built in place the infrastructure to kind of do this. We're just missing the last piece at the interface to the GPUs. And so it's like, I don't want to give too much away, but some might infer from this that perhaps some work has already been done on this in Lumo already.

17:27Andy Greenberg:I recently chatted with McKinsey's Dan Swan about how businesses successfully transitioned to AI, the coming agentic wave, and even the sad loss of tennis line judges. Here's a sneak peek.

17:38Andy Yen:Some people are buying software and calling it a transformation. The people that are really getting the most value from it are fundamentally doing something very different, which is they're taking that technology and they're incorporating it with changing the capabilities of their people, fundamentally redesigning their processes and tracking the impact through the bottom line. There's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan, which can be found in its entirety on Wired.com. Also, check out McKinsey's playbook, Rewired, available at your favorite bookseller. This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Gina Raimondo on AI and the future of work.

18:17Andy Yen:If we have the best chips and the best models and the biggest data centers and a 15 % unemployment rate in this country, we will not win this AI global competition. Everyone is all, oh, we can't have regulation. We have to beat China. Let me tell you, you know who would be the happiest man if we have double-digit unemployment rate? Yeah, Xi Jinping would love us to be eating ourselves a lot. So let's not be so stupid. Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on The Political Scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

19:02Andy Yen:now setting ai aside the other elephant in the room most common reason i get asked about proton these days is of course this fear of creeping fascism in the u.s i think around the world This is an extremely fraught political moment. And people are afraid of surveillance in some ways more than ever before from the government. Is that also pushing people towards Proton? Are you seeing a Trump bump?

19:30Andy Greenberg:Well, you know, we definitely saw a Trump bump, but we also saw a Biden bump. I think privacy is one of those few issues which is not really partisan. It's something that is appreciated by both the left and right. So when Biden came into power, the people that supported Trump said, well, I'm not comfortable with these crazy leftists having control of my data and spying on me. And then when Trump got in power, people are less of all. I'm not comfortable with these crazy fascists having access to my data. So it's a concern that actually is a concern for both sides. And I think that's actually a good thing because today in politics, everything is so polarized.

20:05Andy Greenberg:But this is one thing where kind of both sides can agree upon. Now, the way I like to explain this to people is you probably know in privacy, there's kind of the famous nothing to hide argument, right? I don't need privacy, I have nothing to hide. And I'm not doing anything illegal. and even if that is true the problem is what is considered illegal changes over time so you have nothing to hide as long as you agree with the current definition of what is quote-unquote illegal and so so i think the the lesson from this is it doesn't really matter if you're political leaning whether you're on the left in the right or in the center privacy is something that you should care about because it's the only guarantee that you have that no matter how the next election goes, your data is secure.

20:56Andy Greenberg:It's, yeah, we see the bump each time there's an election, doesn't matter who gets into power. And I think that's a good thing. That means that it is still today a nonpartisan issue.

21:04Andy Yen:Yeah, I mean, I would, I'm sure that's true. And I would love to kind of get on board with this, this bipartisan push for privacy in opposition to any party taking power. But I just feel like we have to acknowledge that this current administration has vowed to use the Department of Justice to prosecute its adversaries, its political adversaries, that it has vowed to deport millions of people living in America, that it's given billions of dollars to ICE to carry out that mission. I mean, I don't mean to force you to take the political side here, but it does feel like we're in a certain moment.

21:35Andy Greenberg:Yes. And the moment is especially relevant because I can give you maybe the European context to this. You could accurately, probably pretty accurately say that politics in the US really lurched to the right in the past 10 years or so. And the same thing is happening in Europe as well. In the UK, if the election were to be held now, it's quite possible the far-right party, you know, reform could win. If you look at France, and you look at the polling for the next presidential election, La Pen, even with her, you know, ankle bracelets, has a decent chance of winning. If you today, let's say in France or in Spain or even in the US, were to put in place more surveillance, more regulations, more controls over the free internet, because you think that might prevent the far right from coming into power, well, if they come into power, they're going to take the new regulations, the new surveillance ordinances, the new surveillance powers that you have put into the legislation, and they're going to use that against you.

22:43Andy Greenberg:So the powers that Trump is using today to suppress dissent and go after people that don't agree with him, actually he didn't pass any new legislation on this at all over the course of his most recent term. In fact, he was using powers that were already in place when Obama was around, when Biden was around, and maybe even from further be fine, right? Right. Absolutely. So the danger is probably these powers should not have been there in the first place. And they were probably tolerated for a long time because people thought, oh, well, I trust the current people in power. But this can change very quickly in a democracy.

23:21Andy Greenberg:And this is the cautionary tale for why age verification, ID to use the internet, data retention laws, all this information, all this stuff that is being pushed out. I think this is, when the far it gets in the power. You've just given them all the tools they need to really mess up democracy. And so we need to have a more balanced approach. And I think this is why I look at a lot of these legislative efforts that are being pushed across Europe these days. And I think people are not thinking through what can actually happen if they succeed today in passing this new regulations.

23:52Andy Yen:Well, going back to Snowden, this is exactly what he called turnkey tyranny. He was warning not just that the Obama administration would use these surveillance powers, but that they were building a machine that any tyrant could turn the key on and create a panopticon. I guess the question is, do you feel like that is happening now in the U.S. in particular?

24:12Andy Greenberg:Well, it's already happened in the U.S. Like I said, Trump didn't pass any legislation. He just took the powers that were already present there that any president could have deployed, and he deployed it in the way that he saw fit, which was in ways that people didn't anticipate. But this is the reason why you have to have the foresight when you pass the legislation. You need to be careful in legislation because you cannot always assume that your preferred party is still going to be in power in the future. And you need to consider, would I be happy to have this law on the books if it was somebody else in power?

24:44Andy Greenberg:And if the answer is no, then you probably should not pass that law.

24:48Andy Yen:I have to press you on this just a little bit, though, because there was some controversy around your statements about partisan politics in the U.S. and protons. A couple of years ago, around the time that Trump was elected, you tweeted 10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys. But today, the tables have completely turned. I think people got mad about that. And then Proton put out a statement that actually kind of backed it up that included this line until corporate Dems are thrown out. The reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle big tech abuses.

25:20Andy Yen:Do you stand by that a couple of years into this Trump administration? Where did that come from? Was it a kind of subtle endorsement of the left, actually, in opposition to centrist Democrats? Or can you explain this?

25:32Andy Greenberg:Well, actually, this was the context around this was talking about the antitrust pick that Trump put in place. And, you know, to be completely fair, when Biden made his antitrust pick, I like that pick as well. So I also praise that one. Right. And I actually thought Trump picked the right person for antitrust. I thought that was a good candidate. The pick that I liked eventually was fired by Trump. And probably the prospects of, let's say, antitrust at the DOJ level is not going to be the same now as it was when Gail Slater was still in place. Now, what I think, though, is interesting is if you look at what's happening in Capitol Hill, Senator Grassley and Klobuchar have reintroduced the American Choice Innovation Online Act, right?

26:18Andy Greenberg:So that's back. And I don't know if it's going to pass this time around. It didn't make it under Biden. But the fact that Bill got reintroduced and is being discussed does show that antitrust is not dead in the U.S. And this is, in my opinion, very important because the European Commission is not going to be able to effectively regulate American tech companies. It just does not have the power and the capability to do that. the only government that can really regulate US tech is actually the US. So the cutting edge of antitrust enforcement, the place that will make the biggest impact is still actually US.

26:57Andy Greenberg:And I think we need to do our best to support the antitrust efforts, because this is the one thing that is going to make a difference, because capitalism is not going to solve this problem for us. In fact, we know very well that capitalism is the creation and the cause of this problem. And if I were to go back to what I think, what my suggestion would be for Democrats, right, as they, you know, prepare for the midterm elections and maybe taking back the White House potentially at some point in the future, I think Bernie was correct in his assessment of why they lost the last election. And you need to be able to offer something different if you want to actually be competitive.

27:37Andy Greenberg:And today, if I look at tech policy views on antitrust and willingness to challenge the big corporates that, in my view, have way too much power, there is not much of a difference between the two parties in the U.S. And that is something that we've seen over and over again where every single administration is unable to get antitrust passed.

27:59Andy Yen:So essentially, it sounds like you are just an anti-corporatist above all, perhaps. Like you were kind of voicing your support, maybe your optimism, your hope that the Trump administration would take an antitrust approach to big tech. It doesn't seem like that happened. In fact, I would say that big tech has completely lined up behind Trump. I worried reading your statement that maybe Proton was as well lining up behind Trump. It doesn't sound like that's the case. If anything, it sounds like you are ready to join the Democratic Socialists of America. Is that correct?

28:35Andy Greenberg:Well, look, I don't really discuss politics, but I did give away most of Proton to a non-profit foundation. And Bernie would probably approve. Let's put it that way.

28:44Andy Yen:Well, I'd like to come back to Proton's interesting organizational structure. But the EU has also shown signs of wanting to undermine encryption. And now we see the advent of this chat control that I think it will voluntarily ask big tech companies not to put back doors into end-to-end encryption as privacy advocates have always feared, but rather to scan content on the endpoints, which is arguably a different way of undermining people's privacy. What do you think of this push for surveillance in some form in Europe? What is it like to be a privacy-preserving anti-surveillance company in Europe today?

29:22Andy Greenberg:The thing that I found disappointing was that the push for chat control actually came from the political left. It was actually the socialist minister from Denmark, when Denmark had the presidency of the EU. Now, in the end, I think the EU did the right thing because it split chat control into sort of two versions. There's the version where you're allowed to voluntarily do scanning. So this is what we call 1.0. And there's a version 2.0, which is you'll be forced to do scanning. It was not voluntary anymore.

29:53Andy Yen:Right. And we should say what this scanning is. The idea is that because the information might be encrypted in transit or at the server, Instead, you scan people's computers at the endpoints. You scan their phones.

30:06Andy Greenberg:You scan the phones. So before you write a message, it's going to check with Big Brother if the message is okay. If it's not okay, it sends it to the police and the police come arrest you. This is basically what 2.0 would have done, right? And that sounds crazy, right? It is crazy. So I think there was enough opposition in Europe that people woke up to the dangers of that. These things are like zombies. They have a way of coming alive again and reappearing. but my take is that actually 2.0 is dead and 1.0 the voluntary scanning that was well that probably shouldn't have passed but they used some fancy tricks in the european parliament a couple weeks ago to find a way to pass that but that for me is not so objectionable because it doesn't break the n10 encryption it doesn't force scanning it just allows you to do it on a voluntary basis if you decide that you want to do that.

30:57Andy Yen:Meaning the company, though, not the user. It's not like the user gets... Yeah, the company decides.

31:01Andy Greenberg:So essentially, Google and all these companies, yeah, now they're going to go scan all your shit and they're going to do it happily now that they have legal cover to do it. Proton is not going to do it, but 2.0 would have forced us, and it's a good thing that 2.0 didn't pass.

31:15Andy Yen:Well, it's interesting. This kind of voluntary scanning model, maybe it creates more pressure for people to move from Google to Proton, But it also seems like it will create an environment where the government can say, essentially, look, all these other companies opted in, but Proton, you're protecting all of these evildoers. What's your problem? And that creates pressure on you. Perhaps it's a foot in the door to create a more mandatory kind of scanning.

31:40Andy Greenberg:Yeah, it's a slippery slope. And once you open the door a little bit, it becomes easier to push the door open wider. And this is something that we have to be kind of very careful about. I would say, though, Europe has this problem of how we could compete in digital in the future. And this is important because the European economy today is not competitive. In fact, There's massive economic problems that are impacting the entire continent. And what I think is important is there has to be a tech sector that can be successful in Europe. Because tech is the driver of most economic growth for the past couple of decades.

32:18Andy Greenberg:And Europe today doesn't have a tech sector. In fact, it doesn't. And we need to think about, if you want to build a tech sector in Europe, what is going to be the competitive advantage for our industry? we are not going to have more money or a bigger market than the u.s not going to compete there we're also not going to work longer hours than the chinese i'm from taiwan so i can tell you it's not going to happen right having lived in europe for 15 years and it's also not going to have the efficiency of china where democracy is kind of an afterthought so if you don't have the money and the talent of the US and you don't have the speed and also in some sense the scale of China and the work ethic of China, what do you have left to actually compete effectively?

33:04Andy Greenberg:I think the only thing that Europe has left is actually the values. What Europe stands for is democracy, freedom, privacy, and security. And the four things that I mentioned are predicated on the concept of trust. So trust is Europe's actually only competitive advantage in the digital era. And if you pass legislation like chat control, which undermines that trust, what you're basically doing is you're destroying the foundation for your future economic success. And this is the message that I'm trying to push in Brussels and other capitals across Europe, because once you realize that, then you understand how ridiculous and how counterproductive something like chat control is.

33:53Andy Greenberg:I recently chatted with McKinsey's Dan Swan about how businesses successfully transitioned to AI, the coming agentic wave, and even the sad loss of tennis line judges. Here's a sneak peek.

34:04Andy Yen:Some people are buying software and calling it a transformation. The people that are really getting the most value from it are fundamentally doing something very different, which is they're taking that technology and they're incorporating it with changing the capabilities of their people, fundamentally redesigning their processes, and tracking the impact through the bottom line. There's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan, which can be found in its entirety on Wired.com. Also, check out McKinsey's playbook, Rewired, available at your favorite bookseller. This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Gina Raimondo on AI and the future of work.

34:43Andy Yen:If we have the best chips and the best models and the biggest data centers and a 15 % unemployment rate in this country, we will not win this AI global competition. Everyone is, oh, we can't have regulation. We have to beat China. Let me tell you, you know who would be the happiest man if we have double digit unemployment rate? Yeah, Xi Jinping would love us to be eating ourselves a lot. So let's not be so stupid. Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on The Political Scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

35:27Andy Yen:chat control as we were saying you know it might actually push more people to proton for the short term but maybe it's bad for privacy in europe in the world in the long term it brings me to this question we were talking about earlier about what is proton's incentive is i don't actually even understand, is Proton a for-profit company? I know you are part of a Swiss foundation. Can you explain what is Proton seeking as a corporation?

35:54Andy Greenberg:Well, I think structure is a very interesting question, and our structure is quite unique. And maybe the best way to answer your question is to explain the solution that we thought was the best to address that issue. History will tell if it was right move or not. If you look at Google, Google's slogan used to be, don't be evil, right? Oh, of course. Yeah.

36:15Andy Yen:Circa 2006, 2007.

36:17Andy Greenberg:What happened? How did Google go from don't be evil to, well, basically evil? I think two things happened. One, there was a misaligned interest between Google and the interest of its actual users. Because today, if you're a user of Google, actually you're not Google's customer, right? You're the product that they're selling to the real customers, which is the advertisers. So there was a fundamental conflict of interest that was inherent in Google's business model. The number two thing was a corporation is kind of a very imperfect vehicle because it is forced by statute, actually. I think it's legally compelled to act in the best interest of shareholders.

37:00Andy Greenberg:And the best interest of shareholders of a for-profit corporation is a maximization of profit. even at the interests of users and customers of that business. And that, if you think about it, is another misalignment of interests which exists in the corporate role. So going back to kind of the question of my politics, you could say that I'm an anti-corporatist. I don't believe in corporation as the correct structure to meet the needs of society as a whole. So Proton's structure is, let's say, a way to try to resolve that paradox. Well, can I ask you, like, what is the structure? What is it? So the structure today is the largest shareholder, the controlling shareholder, is a non-profit foundation.

37:47Andy Greenberg:And the sole asset that this foundation holds is actually shares of a for-profit proton AG. The reason I suspect this is going to work is twofold. A corporation, so the proton, the corporation, is accountable to its shareholder. But the biggest shareholder is a non-profit foundation whose mission is democracy, privacy, and security and freedom around the world. That means that the company will never be pressured to take actions that undermine that because it is inconsistent with the mission of its primary shareholder. On the other hand, the company does make a profit. It is self-sustaining. It doesn't have VC investors.

38:34Andy Greenberg:Its employees actually have stock options, so they retain a profit incentive. And we will have to compete in a capitalistic market in an efficient and effective way to survive in the doggy dog world of capitalism as a corporation. This is also a protection for the foundation. Because the foundation actually is controlled not by shareholders, not shareholders, it's controlled by its funders. If you're a foundation and all of your funding comes from one or two entities, guess what? Actually, you're controlled by those one or two entities. But Proton Foundation gets all its money from a profitable company, which it controls.

39:15Andy Greenberg:So it is not subject to pressure from external stakeholders either. And this is why the combination of the corporate with the foundation, in my opinion, is a self-reinforcing structure that actually protects both the company and the foundation. We'll see in 10 years if I'm right or wrong.

39:31Andy Yen:It does sound very, I don't know, I've never heard of a tech company that works quite like this way before. I mean, clearly the for-profit structure is not working to provide an alternative to surveillance capitalism. I worry that the non-profit structure isn't working either because it leaves you begging, essentially. It makes you beholden, perhaps, to donors.

39:54Andy Greenberg:It's about checks and balances. The fact that the nonprofit owns a profitable business means that it's not banking around every single year for donations. That means it's sustainable. It's secure for the long term. But the company being controlled by the nonprofit means that the company needs to embody and adhere to certain values. And it has never been done. It is completely an experiment. It very well may fail in the next couple of years. We're going to see how this goes. but I think it sort of avoids the pitfalls of both of the examples that I gave. And so this is the answer that I arrived at as a pragmatic anticorporous.

40:36Andy Yen:Yeah, well, we'll see. I'll have you, let's check in in 2036. Before I let you go, there is one other question I wanted to ask you. This is perhaps my just personal obsession. Proton has successfully end and encrypted so much of its users' lives and especially their work lives, But there's still Slack, this massive repository of sensitive workplace communications. None of it is encrypted. Same goes for Discord, Microsoft Teams, like whatever flavor of this you use in your organization. It all feels like this huge vulnerability that this giant repository of searchable, unencrypted communications about everything we're talking about in our workplace can be breached or obtained by law enforcement, just subpoenas.

41:22Andy Yen:So when is Proton going to release Proton Slack, Proton Chats, whatever you call this, like Proton Discord?

41:29Andy Greenberg:Okay, I can't answer the when because that assumes I'm doing it. Can't confirm or deny. I'm going to give it like that. But I agree with you. I think that's a problem. and it's something that we think a lot about. We recently released ProtonMeet, which is an N10 encrypted Microsoft Teams or N10 encrypted Zoom. And that starts to put us closer to chat space as well because actually you can chat when you're having a video call for somebody on the side. And the chats are actually N10 encrypted. We've already figured that out. So I think we have the pieces to do it. And stay tuned, right? I hope to be able to solve this problem for people someday in the future.

42:08Andy Yen:All right. Thank you, Andy. I really appreciate you doing this. Great to talk.

42:11Andy Greenberg:Great. Thanks a lot for having me on.

42:17Andy Yen:The Big Interview is produced by Kate Osborne. Music and mixing by Pran Bandy. Fact-checking by Matt Giles. I'm Andy Greenberg, senior writer for Wired, filling in for Katie Drummond. Check back here on Thursday for the latest episode of Uncanny Valley, where Wired's writers and editors add you to their Slack channel. Also, if you like what you hear but want to also see us, check us out on Wired's YouTube. And as always, please rate and review.

42:51Andy Yen:AI is everywhere in the workplace, but which companies are really making it work? That's the question at the heart of Rewired, McKinsey's playbook for winning with technology and AI. When you think about it from a company or a CEO perspective, it's actually not any harder than it is when you've done any transformation in the past, right? You got to go and understand what's the opportunity, how much is it worth, what's the investment required to get there, and is it going to be important for me to transform my business in that regard? But a lot of people don't actually go through that process of then understanding what are those two or three areas, and then making the hard call.

43:28Andy Yen:Sometimes it's actually more difficult to say we're not doing four through six than it is to say we are doing one through three. There's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan, which can be found in its entirety on Wired.com. Also, check out McKinsey's playbook, Rewired, available at your favorite bookseller. This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Gina Raimondo on AI and the future of work. If we have the best chips and the best models and the biggest data centers and a 15 % unemployment rate in this country, we will not win this AI global competition. Everyone is all, oh, we can't have regulation.

44:05Andy Yen:We have to beat China. Let me tell you, you know who would be the happiest man if we have double digit unemployment rate? Yeah, Xi Jinping would love us to be eating ourselves a lot. So let's not be so stupid. Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on the political scene. Available wherever you get your podcasts.