Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.”

In a follow-up message, Yen reiterated his point: “only losers think like that.” His ultimate message for the team was to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”

That exchange was just one of many that showed how Yen and other company executives are aggressively pushing Proton towards AI. Proton is a Swiss company that famously makes the encrypted email service Proton Mail and a suite of privacy and security-focused products, including an encrypted drive service, an authenticator app, a password manager, and more.

In the last few months, Yen set up an email address for employees to contact if they come across anything blocking adoption of AI at Proton, so leadership can “ruthlessly smash everything that stands in the way of AI velocity;” Proton installed software on workers’ computers that track how much AI code the company is generating; and Yen said this is the last year that Proton will hire engineers at all, and instead only hire people to build things with AI.

That AI push came to head this week when 404 Media reported Proton said it would re-interview staff about their use of AI, with the clear implication that those interviews, and employees’ willingness to embrace AI, could decide whether a worker is fired or not.

404 Media spoke to eight current and one former Proton employees and reviewed Slack chats, meeting recordings, and an AI manifesto written by the company’s CTO. Our reporting reveals a culture of fear inside Proton, where many employees are hesitant to even mildly critique Yen’s views or discuss engineering problems. Workers describe an environment where employees have genuine concerns about security or being asked to develop security products with AI, but feel unable to voice them, lest Yen berates them in front of everyone or threatens their employment at the company.

“The CEO is in full AI psychosis and has been for a while now,” one of the sources told 404 Media.

Our reporting also paints a picture of Proton that is likely very different to the public’s perception of a company with a goal of carefully protecting privacy: one that in reality is barreling ahead with AI as quickly as possible so it can achieve the explicit goal of more annual revenue.

“Due to insufficient velocity,” Proton is not on track to achieve its annual recurring revenue target by the end of the year, one internal document obtained by 404 Media reads. Proton’s year-over-year growth is also “far away from what the market today considers to be good,” and, “By all metrics that matter, we’re an underperforming company.”

In response to detailed questions from 404 Media, a Proton spokesperson did not dispute any of our reporting or characterization of what’s happening inside of the company. 

“It’s clear that some people at Proton are unhappy with our direction, or misunderstand it, and many people are anxious,” they said. “In our determination to move fast, we have sometimes been too blunt or too slow in explaining ourselves to our people. We will work on that, as their questions are the ones we most need to answer.”

Yen, a former CERN particle physicist, projects a measured approach in public, but internally he acts more like what one employee described as a “petulant child.” In May, Proton announced it was implementing post-quantum cryptography which should protect against future attacks from quantum computers. The work took years of effort, with one caveat that it would not work on older emails, only those written after the feature’s launch, at least for the moment. Yen was not happy that Proton was drawing attention to this limitation.

In a Slack channel dedicated to thanking people for their work, Yen jumped in. “Get it fixed,” he wrote, referring to Proton’s Reddit post announcing the feature. “Now Reddit is pissed and we look worse than Tuta,” he added, referring to a Proton competitor. When employees explained to Yen the nuances of the encryption and why that was not immediately possible, Yen wrote, “I find this whole thing stupid. You cannot announce this in this way.”

“Now we are left with two shitty choices. Deprioritize more important tasks for the business to re-encrypt old emails, or constantly get attacked online for not doing it. So maybe you can enlighten me on which of the two shitty choices we will take,” he wrote. “In the future there are two options. Either you guys are confident enough to not fuck this up, or you get my advice to make sure it is not fucked up,” he added. He then told a member of the team that made it to “go on Reddit.”

“So go on there with your personal account and comment to set the record straight,” he wrote. “Perception is more important than truth, the truth doesn’t matter if you don’t win on perception.”

One employee told 404 Media, “Whatever persona Andy [Yen] has out of Proton, he’s a straight up bully inside. He routinely breaks his little facade in Slack and calls people losers and stupid, often for stuff he’s paying them for.”

Ever since launching Proton Mail in 2014 after the Snowden revelations, Proton has steadily introduced new products that make Proton more of a worksuite than a simple email provider. More recently, those products were focused around AI, with the launch of Lumo, a large language model (LLM) chatbot that the company says doesn’t log conversations or train on user data. In June, Proton launched a 2.0 version of its chatbot.

Up until this point, Yen’s public comments on AI were relatively tame. In an August interview with WIRED, he said Proton is “building AI features and AI tools, because I think if the privacy companies do not find a way to step in to build privacy-first AI, we are essentially ceding the future to tech companies that don’t have the best interests of users at heart,” and that the company was “capitalizing” on the backlash to corporatized, invasive AI from companies like Google. Last year, Yen and Proton were criticized for statements he made suggesting the Republican Party and Donald Trump would be harder on Big Tech than Democrats. 

Toward the end of August, Yen’s internal tone on AI shifted to having Proton use it as much as possible, and as quickly as possible, according to the Slack chats and multiple employees.

“The train is coming, get onboard or get crushed. Don’t be the professional fax machine operator in the internet age,” he wrote to the security Slack channel. “I think by the end of this year most developers stop programming and start writing specs for tests that AI will code and run, to validate AI written code that humans will no longer be able to review. This will be the last year that we hire engineers, and starting next year we hire what we used to call product managers, to build things with AI.”

AI is changing how cybersecurity works, with AI agents hacking into companies, and AI assisting in the discovery of gaping vulnerabilities in important code. Many companies across the privacy and security space are grappling with how to deal with AI, either in the development of their products or how to defend themselves against hackers who are using AI. Some may do this carefully. Others are trying to do it as quickly as possible for profit. This account of Proton’s own reckoning with AI provides an unprecedented insight into what is happening inside one security-focused company users especially trust. 

Initially, using AI was banned inside Proton, but the company has since approved AI for all sorts of use cases internally, including processing financial data, drafting customer-facing responses on Reddit and LinkedIn, and writing code “except when that source code contains information that would give immediate advantage to a competitor” or is related to “innovation or R&D [research and development],” according to an internal Proton document seen by 404 Media. Ninety percent of code at Proton in October was written by AI, the company’s CTO Bart Butler said in a meeting, according to audio 404 Media obtained. Much of that code is written with Anthropic’s Claude, multiple employees told 404 Media. And Yen tells employees in Slack chats to use Claude, too. 

“We are a tech company against Big Tech who are spending loads on Claude,” one employee told 404 Media.

In the “bullshit and loser thinking” conversation, another employee pushed Yen for specifics on ensuring that AI-generated code was free of security issues. “AI won’t magically solve our problems, because security is low in our prioritization at present,” the engineer said. Yen didn’t respond directly, and went on to insult one of the other employees in front of the entire channel. The employee “is saying his usual bs of we can do it but we will be even slower than we are today and I’m saying only losers think like that,” Yen wrote, adding that workers should prompt “better.”

“You have the models and the time every developer should be doing this and checking their code which they were doing before manually but now they can do faster with AI,” Yen added. (One employee stressed that engineers still strive to build in a secure way.) 

The second clear signal that Proton was going deep into AI for many employees happened when Butler, the CTO, published a self-described AI manifesto one Friday afternoon last month.

“Your old job is gone,” the manifesto, posted to Slack, told engineers. It laid out a future for Proton that fully embraced AI, and said if the company did not do so, that posed an “existential threat to the success of the mission itself.”

Butler said that Proton needs to change in three key ways: accept that an engineers’ job is now to help LLMs write better code, faster; that Proton needs to get to the point where most code is not reviewed by humans but by AI; and to more fundamentally change the company as a whole, and “commit, as an organization, to the transformation that the moment requires.”

One Proton employee replied in Slack, “Perhaps scaring people with: We are in a new world. ‘Programming’ is dead [...] your old job is gone wasn’t really necessary on a Friday afternoon.”

Butler replied, “It’s supposed to be provocative, because it needs to be. I suggest you read it, think about it over the weekend, and come with your questions to me on Monday rather than on Slack. Thanks!”

An employee told 404 Media, “​​People were surprised and somewhat cringed out, since the document clearly exaggerates what you can do with LLMs today and doesn't address any of the problems you get in return for giving up your code base to the AI Jesus (e.g. AI cannot really maintain a large code base over time).” Another called it “ethically bankrupt.”

Earlier this week, Proton sent the email to employees saying they would re-interview workers about how they use AI in their jobs. The tone was clear; you may lose your job because of these interviews, current employees told 404 Media. “These re-interviews are consequential,” the email read. Soon after, a senior employee spoke up in Slack to Yen about the re-interviewing process. He suggested instead that Proton detect who is falling behind and support them and enforce high quality training.

Yen’s response was blunt: “Let’s put it this way, we already know more or less who is behind. If we were giving up on them, we would not bother with this process.”

The employee replied, “That messaging is fear-based. Which is probably why I suspect there are dozens of other employees watching us talk about this live and except for [other employee] no one else is chiming in.”

“People shouldn’t be scared to talk about this in public and to push back on you and leadership. A fear based culture feels like a cancer to me. It’s the opposite of engineering, you need to talk about things, even uncomfortable things,” they added. Yen eventually told the employee, in front of everyone: “If you are making the accusation that this is a financially driven decision and you don’t trust me when I tell you it’s not, then I think this might not be the place for you.”

Only one other employee chimed in during that exchange: “It’s about the culture you instil, people don’t want to feel like they’re on a tightrope, and yes we understand you want to move fast but there needs to be a balance, people also need support, not everyone is the same.”

“It was also faster for my parents to beat me until I ate my vegetables but I’m not sure it was healthy,” they added.

The exchange with Yen was unusual not only in that someone was debating some of Yen’s ideas, but also that it directly referenced the culture of fear at Proton. “Whenever someone talks back to Andy it tends to be highlighted since very few people talk back to him,” one employee told 404 Media.

Proton sources described that culture in various ways to 404 Media. One said, “People just shut up and get on with things.” Another added, “Most have just given up. Your expertise will be undermined, you will be told to do what the CEO wants, and there’s a decent chance you’ll be called all types of stupid in the process.” A third said there is “100%” a culture of fear, especially in the last few months. “Andy [Yen] tends to not communicate; when things are communicated, it is ‘this is happening.’ Views in which he doesn’t share, he can be hostile to and will shit on people in public chats. Like even for managers… which doesn’t look very prof[essional].” A fourth said, “Andy [Yen] truly seems to hate a lot of the people that work here.”

In a meeting held after leadership sent the re-interview email, which 404 Media obtained audio of, Butler said that not everyone who received the email would in fact be re-interviewed. “So don’t freak out if you don’t receive an invite. Most of you will, but not all, just for logistical reasons and otherwise, or it’ll happen later.”

“Nobody gets a pass from this, basically,” he said, referring to how Yen had already interviewed around 40 people, including Butler. Yen also re-interviewed Eamonn Maguire, the director of engineering for AI and machine learning, he said at another point. People who scored highly in those interviews are now being tasked with interviewing other Proton employees, Butler said.

“You should not blow this off, okay? It's consequential. It's not either that you are interviewing, fighting for your life, like in some sort of Hunger Games thing,” he continued. But, “it’s an opportunity and a risk, okay? If you haven’t done anything with AI and you haven’t thought about it, you haven’t changed how you work, and you’re in product design or engineering, well, now is the time. And if you have done things and you feel confident in it, that’s good too.” A speaker in the meeting also mentioned that some people may get promoted through the re-interviews.

“I think we’ll see what the results say. But I urge you to take it seriously, but not freak out, I guess,” Butler said. “This isn’t a witch hunt,” he added. “It’s not a religion.”

As for why this push for AI is happening around, “It’s because we ran out of time,” Butler said.

“Perception is more important than truth, the truth doesn’t matter if you don’t win on perception.”

Yen’s feverish desire for Proton to radically embrace AI can be explained, at least in part, by an internal Proton document laying out the company’s intention to make something it is calling a fast team of people who will try to make the company build at a much more rapid clip. The document says Proton is not on track to achieve its annual recurring revenue target by the end of the year because of “insufficient velocity.”  The company’s year-over-year growth is “far away from what the market today considers to be good,” and, “By all metrics that matter, we’re an underperforming company.”

Second, the document says Proton transitioning to an “AI-first company” requires additional time and effort before it will start to see efficiency gains. For around six months, Proton has been in an experimental phase with AI, but now the company is taking concrete steps to restructure the company around AI, according to meeting audio 404 Media obtained.

Third, the document says Proton “suffered a catastrophic 6 hour downtime which showcased to the world (and to us) that Proton’s engineering is not actually reliable and resilient. We need to quickly remedy this problem, which will also increase workload because we need to pursue these reliability improvements simultaneously with shipping features ASAP to accelerate our growth rate.” That incident was in August.

Possible solutions to make the company faster are to move to the U.S. or China, the document says, which is “not an option for Proton unfortunately,” presumably referring to being headquartered in Switzerland for its strong privacy protections. Second is firing a lot of people and then rehiring, which Proton says is unrealistic because “we are based in Europe, where firing the wrong people is slow, and hiring the right people even slower.” The third is to “transform the company from within.”

To solve some of these apparent problems, the document calls for the creation of an “elite fast team” which will demand a lot more work, including weekends. Being on the fast team offers a 30 percent increase to base salary, paid out as a monthly bonus; a company credit card employees can use to order food if working hard during weekends, upgrade a long haul flight work flight to business class, get a five star hotel when visiting another office, or take colleagues out to dinner for team building. 

“This program is not for everybody. It requires a certain drive and mental toughness. We expect it to be no more than 5-10% of the company. But for the ambitious, the young (or old), or those who are simply bored, come join the team that will re-found Proton for the future,” the document says. Yen also spoke in Slack chats about Proton being a “996 company,” referring to the culture of working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, a practice that started in China and is becoming popular in Silicon Valley. The extra perks and money appear to be a move to get employees to work more than their contracted hours, which is harder to implement in Europe given its strong labor laws. 

“That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure.”

In other settings where Yen is not present, employees and managers are more open about what is going on. 

In another meeting 404 Media obtained audio of, a Proton employee said they do not trust Andy’s judgement on highly technical choices. In another, even Butler said Yen doesn’t understand the technical points about the AI topics he is re-interviewing people on.

“And for those of you maybe, oh, what the fuck does Andy know about anything technical? He doesn’t, and it’s not that technical,” Butler said. “But what this approach does do, is there’s nothing like a deadline to motivate people,” he said, referring to the re-interviews.

When asked about Yen’s comments, whether there is a culture of fear in Proton, and may people be fired based on the re-interviews, a Proton spokesperson told 404 Media in an email, “Times of major change are scary, and the tech industry as a whole is contending with this transition. We have not always communicated our intentions as well as we could have, but Proton is committed to helping our colleagues retrain and reskill for the future.” 

On Wednesday, Yen started a new thread in the company’s Slack in an uncharacteristically calmer tone. “When thinking about Al, it's not really about the capabilities today, but what capabilities might be possible in the future, which is probably less distant than we think. We will need to transform our org, and doing so requires knowing who is using Al well, who is mis-using Al, or who hasn't used Al at all (don't be in this group),” he wrote. For much of the day, with the November re-interviews looming, almost nobody was working on actual work and standup meetings were cancelled, one employee said.

One employee replied to Yen with Reddit posts from Proton users reacting to 404 Media’s article first breaking news of the re-interviews. “I'm paying a premium for this service and as such I demand that corners are not cut simply because some new technology of dubious means comes into existence. I want coders to understand their code. I want them to think about the problems they are trying to solve and come to those conclusions naturally. It will create a better product with reproducible results. If you want to replace some jobs replace the jobs of the people who thought this email was a good idea,” one of them pasted into Slack read.

Yen, usually concerned with what people were saying on Reddit, didn’t respond.

In early September, Montreal game studio KO-OP announced it would be “saying goodbye” to 13 people, citing–like so many others–difficulty finding funding. But unlike other layoffs in the games industry, which tend to strike suddenly from on-high, those affected had been involved in the decision from the beginning, and had actively voted for the outcome.

“As with all our company's operational decisions, this one was made democratically,” KO-OP wrote in its announcement. “Our members are regularly updated on our cash flow situation, and were made aware of this upcoming shortfall well in advance. Membership then appointed a group to plan for this eventuality, and ratified their recommendations. Team leads and our elected executives will also be impacted by these reductions. We believe this level of transparency and accountability ought to be a minimum requirement for all organizations.”

An important update from KO_OP.

[image or embed]

— KO_OP: 🪐 Wishlist Young Suns on Steam! (@ko-op.com) September 10, 2026 at 11:32 AM

It’s an unusual process for any company, but not necessarily one for KO-OP: The studio–which was founded in 2012, and has made games including Gnog, Goodbye Volcano High, and its current project Young Suns–operates as a co-operative. Everyone at the studio, which was roughly 30 people prior to the cuts, makes the same amount of money, $90K CAD ($63K USD). In addition to members’ game development work, they’re required to help with administrative tasks by joining committees dedicated to topics like hiring and finance, and membership meets every other month to talk as a group about how things are going and to vote on proposals about the studio.

“We try to call ourselves ‘worker run,’ because all of our operations are democratically operated and managed,” co-founder and studio director Saleem Dabbous told Aftermath over a video call, noting that the studio is still working toward legally becoming a co-op. 

As the studio has grown, especially during production of Young Suns, its structure and operations have had to grow with it. Prior to the cuts, membership had elected a six-person “executive committee,” and it was this committee that was tasked with coming up with proposals for how to deal with KO-OP’s financial problems and, ultimately, who to let go. 

Dabbous and former narrative designer Jenna Yow, who lost their job, largely referred to the cuts as furloughs, since KO-OP hopes to hire affected workers back. Affected workers are still eligible to receive any profits from Young Suns, and they can still attend studio meetings and vote on company decisions. They “still have the ability and the choice to be involved with the operations of the co-op at large, because it's in their best interest to see how things are progressing in case we're able to rehire them,” said Dabbous. 

“With [a] layoff, generally, it's like a handshake, like a goodbye, it's done… Our intent is essentially to try to do the best we can by everybody, within our means, and to try to keep that as transparent as possible.”

And while workers didn’t know ahead of time who would be affected, they knew the cuts were coming and had time to prepare. This proved valuable for Yow, who was hired four and half years ago to work on narrative for Goodbye Volcano High as their first full-time job in the games industry out of college. During the furlough discussions, they had been trying to move to KO-OP’s Montreal office from the Seattle area. Aware they might not have a job and subsequently a visa if they moved, they were able to instead plan a move to live near family on the East Coast. 

“Really the biggest benefit of it [was] just having the time to prepare… and then just kind of make plans accordingly, which is not something a lot of other people at other studios get to do,” Yow told Aftermath in the video call.

“Even though this situation is not one I would wish on anybody, I do feel like it's probably the best way it could have happened for anyone.”

‘While we are a very political space, we're also existing under capitalism’

The need for cuts at KO-OP came about for the same reason they’ve been happening at so many other game studios these days: the funding dried up. Dabbous said KO-OP has been on shaky ground before–“KO-OP has never had a game that's been a hit and has brought sustainable revenue into the studio. By all means, KO-OP should not exist.”--but that in the past they’ve usually been able to get funding for their next project within six months of finishing the previous one. 

“Ultimately, the way we've treated our position is that every game is our last game, and we always are treating it like that. And so we always also have a team that's trying to develop prototypes to figure out what the next thing is before the current game is even finished.”

Young Suns, a life sim set in space, entered Xbox Game Preview in November 2025. (Xbox is the subject of a boycott by the BDS movement.) The studio was pitching new projects, but this time around, potential funders wanted “not only… a prototype, but it needs to be a very polished prototype,” said Dabbous. “The funding rates that we're looking at, that most of our previous conversations were around, have significantly gone down.” 

KO-OP had grown during the production of Young Suns, and to get the kind of money that would let the studio continue at that size, potential funders wanted “a vertical slice or a year of full-time development on a project with the entire team, which is impossible, given that Young Suns is still in production.”

“I'd been at GDC this year and was in a lot of the pitch meetings for showing our decks to people,” said Yow, “and it seemed like it had gone really well, but then ultimately a lot of stuff never panned out.”

“There's just so much pessimism in the market around funding, and even in our conversations with funders and previous partners, there's a lot less opportunities for us,” said Dabbous. “It is feeling a bit more dire than it ever has.”

Following the lack of funding after GDC, the studio’s next best opportunity would have been being able to secure money from the Canadian Media Fund. But a response wouldn’t come until the end of the year, longer than KO-OP’s finance committee had projected the studio’s runway would last. Young Suns ultimately had a full release at the end of August, with a release on Steam still upcoming, but the studio didn’t think the game would provide the kind of revenue KO-OP would need to keep operating.

Workers were aware of the challenges KO-OP was facing. This wasn’t always easy–Yow, who chaired KO-OP’s hiring committee, said, “I don't want to know the realistic numbers, like I don't need to know exactly when the money runs out. I can be told that by someone else, but I don't need to have the exact digits in my brain because that'll, like, kill my sleep,” but also noted that, unlike other studios, it means “there's nothing guarded. The secrecy is at your own discretion, essentially, for most things.”

By the beginning of the summer, the committee projected the studio was approaching having only six months of runway left. “While we are a very political space, we're also existing under capitalism, and our survival is still at risk due to things outside of our control,” noted Dabbous. 

The studio needed a plan for drastic action. Around June, Dabbous began drafting a proposal for the executive committee to present to the rest of membership. The plan was, if necessary, to basically halve the studio, shrinking the team still working on Young Suns to “a core group, and then everybody else [would be] developing projects for funding, which is something that we've struggled to do because we had all hands on deck on Young Suns for a long time.” Hopefully, this could buy the studio “ideally, a year, but buy us at least six to eight months to shift some people to develop some of these projects that we've been talking about for a long time and try to get funding for those, so that we can survive and bring back some folks, if possible.”

The executive committee brought the proposal to the rest of the studio for a vote in July. “The financials forecast was given to us pretty well in advance, like we didn't learn about this and then immediately have to vote on it,” Yow said. “So we knew it was coming. And then as [the financial situation] got more and more certain, it was like, ‘okay, we have to vote on it.’” 

But cuts weren’t the only option on the table. “There’s an option where we just agree that we’re gonna ride it out together throughout the end of this year and call it quits and shut down,” Dabbous said. “If the team voted to just ride it out, ‘let's just all shut down the studio together,’ then that's what we would have done.” 

Over a Zoom call, membership voted: Bar a few abstentions and one “no,” everyone voted for the furlough plan. “Overall, everyone was like, ‘I’d rather KO-OP try to survive, even if that potentially means I will be laid off,’” said Dabbous.

‘It's almost worse when it's everybody on an equal playing field’

Through the summer, the rest of KO-OP’s membership worked on Young Suns and potential projects, while the executive committee worked to determine who would be affected.

“We didn't want it to be a team-wide debate,” Dabbous said of the decision-making process. “We didn't want workers having to argue for their own comrades or their own jobs or anything. I think that there’s a lot of misconceptions with co-ops where it's like, ‘oh, if you're in a co-op and you have to fire someone, everyone has to agree on firing that one person.’ And it's like, no, you don't need to operate it that way. Actually, people don't like to fire people. It actually creates a lot of emotional turmoil, and you should actually elect a smaller group to make those decisions.”

Even though the wider membership of KO-OP wasn’t part of choosing who would go, they definitely felt that turmoil. “It was very stressful,” Yow described that time.“There's a lot of room for speculation in a way that isn't very fun. And sometimes it's almost worse when it's everybody on an equal playing field, compared to a more typical hierarchy of management and non-management.”

Dabbous said the executive committee asked themselves “what have the workers, the members, empowered us to do?” From there, they determined they’d “need a certain amount of people, and a certain amount of people with a certain type of skill set” to be able to continue working on current and future projects. “Then it was like, ‘okay, if those are the things that we're trying to do, who is in the position out of the team to achieve that?’ And that's how, essentially, we made the decision of who should get furloughed versus who should stay.” The committee “created that list, debated it, discussed it, talked about why, and justified it within the group,” Dabbous said.

For those not part of the decision-making, this time was “definitely a bit of a waiting game,” Yow said. “Like, oh god, is today going to be the day that they tell everyone? Is it going to be this week? It was very ominous.”

During this time, Yow was on their third attempt to get a Canadian visa. As the summer progressed, they said a member of the executive committee told them it might not be a good idea to move to Montreal. “It was pretty crushing to know that [being furloughed] was an imminent threat and a real enough possibility that it would not let me move to Montreal,” Yow said. 

In August, individual calls were held with affected workers and one or two members of the executive committee. Dabbous was present on the majority of the calls.

“We didn't want six people delivering news to one person,” Dabbous said. “Originally we were going to…divvy it up, but then we decided to actually try to maintain continuity with all the calls, because it's just better if we're saying the same things, giving the same information, and that there's consistency.” Dabbous said he felt like it was his responsibility “to be there and share this very painful experience with everyone, because I was one of the people involved in making this decision, I was tasked with owning this process. So it feels important to be involved in the hardest part of it; I thought that was the responsible approach.” 

Dabbous said he was “really taken aback at how generous people were when receiving the bad news, about both that they would love to return if given the opportunity, which I think is a really good sign, and also that we handled this specific process with a lot of care and consideration for people overall.”

Once all affected workers had been told, the committee posted the list publicly for the rest of membership. 

Yow, who had already moved back East by this point, said that though they had “made my peace” with getting furloughed before it happened, “it was still very hard, because the state of the industry now is just so, so dire that I basically was like, if I'm not working at KO-OP, I'm probably not working in games.”

“So that was a lot of grieving, not only for my time at KO-OP but also, so to speak, my time in the industry,” they said. Ultimately, their time at KO-OP was extended through September to finish some narrative work on Young Suns, and they’ve lined up another contract in the games industry.

‘I'm angry because I care so much about the place and about the people’

Even though the process was done democratically, not all studio members were happy with how it went. During the day that studio members were told about being furloughed, they could give feedback in a Slack channel, either named or anonymously. 

“I think we've built a culture where every milestone, we do a postmortem, and we talk about genuinely what sucked and what didn't suck,” Dabbous said. “And so I think we've started to build a culture where people know that if they give feedback, they're not going to be punished for feedback.”

Dabbous said that one piece of criticism the executive committee received was that workers wished they’d known the order they’d be having their calls in. Another was that some workers wished the furloughs had occurred on a Thursday, the end of KO-OP’s working week, rather than on a Monday.

Dabbous said Monday was chosen as the day to inform people because he felt that “now that we know what we're doing, we should give people as much lead time as humanly possible” before their last day. “Whereas I think other people felt like, ‘oh, now I kind of feel really emotionally distraught, and I don't really want to spend this week working.’”

KO-OP also held exit interviews with affected workers. “I learned a lot from the exit interviews and about how, actually, this job is really hard because of how much you care about everybody,” said Dabbous. “That is a burden that, I think, is intrinsic to this structure we’re trying to build and [what] this political project is trying to create for people.” 

Yow was one of the people who provided negative feedback on the Monday timing, as well as being “definitely mad” about some of the decisions that had led up to furloughs being necessary in the first place. 

“I was pretty pissed about some things because I, for all that we voted on these decisions, I did have very strong feelings about choosing to work on our pitch versus choosing to work on Young Suns until the last possible minute,” Yow said. “So there definitely is some anger. Like, I won't say this was all peaceful acceptance of fate.”

“But at the same time, I'm angry because I care so much about the place and about the people,” Yow said. “Knowing so much and caring so much about these people makes it hard to really be like, ‘oh, this person's an asshole and I hate them.’ It's like, ‘no, they're pissing me off, but I know where they're coming from.’ It's almost hard to really villainize anybody because we've gotten to know each other so well.”

Both Yow and Dabbous agreed that, while working cooperatively has benefits over traditional structures, it can also lead to unique types of conflict that the studio has to address. This can be especially true given the collective way KO-OOP handles money, where, Dabbous said, the studio has to deal with “how different people's relationships to class and money interface with the work of dealing with the money.”

“[You have to] discuss, first, generational wealth and privilege and things like that in terms of how they affect the decision-making and the policy and the conversations around money. That's work that we have to do regularly to manage conflict and mediate conflict, discussing those aspects as well as the actual work itself.”

Said Yow, “We all have different relationships to our material conditions, so that can be very hard to get other people to reconcile with when you're coming to a collective decision.”

“We [at KO-OP] talk about being an equitable place, but part of being an equitable place is acknowledging the power structures and the privileges and the different dynamics that come with your background, rather than behaving as if they don't exist,” Dabbous said. “And that can be a difficult thing to navigate at times, and also can be a really enriching thing to navigate at times.” 

‘The games industry, or what remains of it, is a better place with KO-OP in it’

Currently, KO-OP’s ultimate fate is still up in the air, and those who remain are grappling with that uncertainty as well as adjusting to what it means to be a smaller team. Some workplace initiatives have been put on hold to focus on in-progress games and pitches, such as further iterations to the makeup of the executive committee.  

“Coming off a much bigger project than we've done before and having to go back down to our previous size is very painful after several years of getting used to what the co-op had become, and all their relationships and expertise that had developed [in] that broader team,” said Dabbous. “So, it's just emotional, it’s gut-wrenching.”

Yow was grateful for the extra time to work on Young Suns, despite the turmoil around the furloughs, and even as they admitted not all of the work they had left to do was very glamorous. “By the end of it, I was very much kind of doing busy work that wasn't that exciting to me, but it was also work that I could reasonably expect to make it out the door in one piece,” they said. 

This felt especially notable when compared to other people they know in the games industry, who have been laid off before their work has even seen the light of day. “At least [my games are] out, at least I have shipped titles for my time at KO-OP.” 

And even when it was hard, they were glad for KO-OP’s worker-run structure. “I definitely like knowing how the sausage gets made, I like being able to participate in how the business runs… Because I'm so early in my career, especially compared to other people at KO-OP, I feel like I was afforded a lot of room to learn and grow that normally I'd have to be squabbling my way up the ladder for.”

This extended to the studio’s flat pay structure as well: Even though they made less money than other game workers they knew in the Seattle area, the openness around workers’ equal pay “kind of alleviates the pressure to feel like you have to keep climbing up the ladder to get the higher pay.”

Overall, they said, their experience at KO-OP “was worth it for me. I can't speak for everybody. ”

“You can't work somewhere for four and a half years and not have frustrations, but despite that, I think the games industry, or what remains of it, is a better place with KO-OP in it,” Yow said. “I do want to come back. I love the people and I love the work. I just want things to be easier if they can be.”

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Binance has confirmed that an attacker exploited the exchange, potentially stealing as much as $5.5 billion from multiple hot wallets.

Luckily for Binance, Tether and Circle quickly began freezing the exploiter's wallets. Tether froze at least $1.567 billion of the roughly $1.768 billion in stolen USDT, and Circle froze around $800 million of the $823 million in USDC. That leaves the attacker with somewhere around $3 billion.

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who is not legally allowed to run the exchange yet seems to remain very closely aware of its inner workings, posted early estimates of the freezes and wrote, "I don’t manage Binance (.com) anymore, but as a shareholder, I expect all user funds will be fully covered." He later added, "Loss might be a bit higher than [$1 billion], but will cover."

• Tweet by Changpeng Zhao

Electronic Arts is shutting down renowned Canadian studio BioWare, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. Four hundred jobs will be cut, which is around 3% of Electronic Arts' staff; fifty of those jobs were from BioWare alone, per the report. BioWare was reportedly working on the next Mass Effect game, which has been canceled, Bloomberg reported, citing an interal memo to staff from Electronic Arts chief operating officer David Tinson and chief studios officer Cam Weber.

BioWare confirmed the studio closure in a post on X shortly after Bloomberg's report was published.

"Now, after more than three decades of shared adventures, BioWare is closing and early development on the next Mass Effect project is ending," BioWare wrote in the post. "There is nothing easy about writing those words. Our focus riht now is on our incredibly talented team who put their hearts into these games, and supporting one another through this transition."

Electronic Arts is also canceling a The Sims game called Project Lotus, instead pivoting toward another game currently called Project Evergreen. Electronic Arts will focus on its sports games, Apex Legends, and its licensed IP projects like Iron Man and the next iteration of Star Wars Jedi. Bloomberg reported that Electronic Arts will also pursue the Battlefield franchise, and that Respawn and DICE are working on a new project, "which is likely to be another entry in the Star Wars: Battlefront series."

Electronic Arts was taken private in August in a $55 billion buyout; the Saudi Arabian government's investment fund led that purchase. The deal left $18 billion in debt on the company's books. Electronic Arts told its investors earlier this year it would cut costs, saving up to $700 million, per Bloomberg, by slashing its research and development budget.

BioWare was once one of the industry's most iconic studios, known for the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, as well as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Baldur's Gate. It was founded more than three decades ago, in 1995, by Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, and Augustine Yip. The company was acquired by Electronic Arts, along with Pandemic Studios, in 2007 for $775 million. BioWare has struggled in recent years to match the success of its earlier games. Anthem, its multiplayer shooter released in 2019, failed to meet expectations and was ultimately shut down in 2025. Dragon Age: Veilguard, released in 2024, similarly struggled to meet Electronic Arts' expectations. It was after that game's release where Electronic Arts started to pull apart BioWare, shuffling employees to other studios and laying off others. By 2025, fewer than 100 employees remained at the company.

Electronic Arts' big, public struggles were confirmed in 2023 when Electronic Arts began rapidly cancelling projects and closing studios. Apex Legends Mobile and Battlefield Mobile were canceled, and developer Industrial Toys was shuttered. Hundreds of quality assurance testers were laid off that year, too, shortly before Electronic Arts announced a massive 6% layoff, cutting 775 employees. Fifty BioWare employees were laid off in 2023, too; they ended up suing the company for better severance pay. The results of that lawsuit have not been made public. Layoffs and cancelations continued from there: in February 2024, Electronic Arts laid off 5% of its workers, or roughly 670 people. A early development Star Wars game was canceled at that time. In 2025, Electronic Arts laid off several hundred people, canceled Cliffhanger Games' Black Panther, and closed the studio. Though Electronic Arts laid off hundreds of people, in March 2025, the studio was up 800 more people than the same time the prior year. The studio has roughly 14,000 employees currently.

The grim reality is that this is not an uncommon course of action in the video game industry. An absurd amount of people are still being laid off each year. Just this year, Microsoft laid of 1,600 people and is expected to cut 1,600 more. The layoffs span companies big and small: Sony Interactive Entertainment, PowerWash Simulator's FuturLab, and Ubisoft are among others who've laid off staff, while Netflix shuttered Oxenfree maker Night School Games.

Anthropic is making changes to its usage policy for the first time in over a year to reflect new and high-risk cases of misuse - including election interference, weapons development, surveillance, and health and financial uses. But one of the most significant changes prohibits "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior" toward Claude.

Last August, the company announced it would allow Claude to end conversations with "persistently harmful or abusive" users as part of its research into "model welfare." The new update says that terminating conversations is still the "primary enforcement mechanism"; Anthropic did not provide a comment o …

Read the full story at The Verge.