Blackshear Leaves Mysten Labs for Anthropic's Security Research Team

Sam Blackshear, co-founder and chief technology officer of Mysten Labs, is leaving his role at the company to join Anthropic as part of its defensive security research team. In a recent announcement, Blackshear expressed his desire to return to hands-on technical work while addressing emerging cybersecurity challenges brought on by AI.

Blackshear is best known for creating Move, a smart-contract language originally developed for Meta's Libra/Diem blockchain project. After working at Meta, he co-founded Mysten Labs in 2021 with several former Diem engineers, including Evan Cheng. As chief technology officer, Blackshear helped architect layer 1 blockchain Sui and contributed to related infrastructure projects such as Walrus.

Despite leaving his operational role, Blackshear will continue serving as an advisor to Mysten Labs and remaining engaged with developers building on the Sui blockchain. He also expressed intent to support the upcoming Move Foundation, which aims to advance the development of the Move programming language.