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Blackshear to Anthropic
Mysten Labs cofounder and chief technology officer Sam Blackshear said on Aug. 6 that he is leaving the Sui developer to join Anthropic for defensive security research involving AI.
“said on Aug. 6 that he is leaving the Sui developer to join Anthropic for defensive security research”
The move keeps Evan Cheng as Mysten Labs chief executive while Mysten’s leadership page identifies Blackshear as a cofounder and CTO before the announcement.
Blackshear said he was motivated by a period in which the “balance of power between attackers and defenders is shifting,” and he announced the change in posts on X.
Mysten Labs partnered with Google Cloud to use generative AI in code development and auditing, including tools trained on Move and an AI based auditing system designed to identify vulnerabilities in Move, Rust, TypeScript and Solidity code.
The reporting also says Blackshear created Move while working at Meta and has spent more than eight years developing the language.
Defensive research focus
Anthropic is expanding defensive cyber research as frontier models improve software vulnerability discovery capabilities rapidly, and the company said Claude Opus 4.6 could identify high severity software vulnerabilities at scale.
Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team studies how advanced models could strengthen defense and offensive activity, and the coverage links the work to the broader concern about shifting attacker-defender dynamics.
In June, Anthropic reported it studied 832 accounts linked to malicious activity and mapped their behavior across the MITRE ATT&CK framework, then banned those accounts.
The same reporting describes Project Glasswing bringing together about 50 partners to search critical software for vulnerabilities.
Another thread in the coverage says separate work with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory used Claude in simulated attacks on a water treatment system.
Security stakes for crypto
The coverage ties Blackshear’s shift to a wider push for AI security capabilities in crypto, noting that many crypto’s biggest players have been seeking access to powerful new AI models to strengthen their code from attacks.
““We need to make sure that the best models we can get are in the hands of defenders”
Solana Foundation chief information security officer Michael Coates said, “We need to make sure that the best models we can get are in the hands of defenders because attackers will have something capable enough.”
The same set of reports frames the problem as a verification and access gap, with Cointelegraph coverage quoting Coates on streamlining “the verification programs, the acceptance programs, to give these models to legitimate defenders.”
It also points to a concrete example of residual risk, saying the $260 million Cetus Protocol exploit showed that a secure programming language cannot remove every application level risk.
Within the Move ecosystem, the reporting says Blackshear plans to remain an adviser to Mysten Labs and developers across the Sui ecosystem while a Move Foundation is “in the works.”
