Mysten Labs CTO Joins Anthropic for AI Security Research
Sam Blackshear, co-founder and CTO of Mysten Labs, has left the company to join Anthropic for AI security research. In a recent post on X, he explained that his decision was driven by the opportunity to focus on defensive security at a time when the balance between attackers and defenders is shifting due to AI-enabled tooling.
Mysten Labs was founded in 2021 by Blackshear and four former Meta executives. As part of his departure, Evan Cheng will take over as the company's technical vision leader. The team will continue building on the Move-based smart contract ecosystem behind Sui.
Blackshear emphasized that AI has accelerated vulnerability discovery and exploitation, pushing smart contract security into a faster and more competitive cycle. He cited an example of porting a static analysis tool to Sui's Move language using Claude, which produced results much faster than prior manual triage.
The move has sparked debate on how to balance safety guardrails around advanced AI models with the need to provide capable tools to security teams. Crypto leaders argue that once publicly available models reach comparable cybersecurity capability, access policies should be revisited.