Mysten Labs' CTO Joins Anthropic for Defensive Security Research

Mysten Labs' CTO Sam Blackshear is leaving his position to join Anthropic, where he will focus on defensive security research. This move comes as AI-enabled tooling puts pressure on the balance between attackers and defenders.

Blackshear framed this shift as an opportunity to apply hands-on technical work to a new problem domain, defending systems against threats that are becoming more scalable and automated. He cited his personal experience with porting a static analysis tool to Sui's Move language using Claude, which produced results far faster than prior manual triage.

This trend of AI accelerating vulnerability discovery and exploitation is pushing smart contract security into a faster, more competitive cycle. Blackshear argued that the timing matters to the broader crypto industry, as attackers can iterate faster across both conventional software targets and blockchain-adjacent infrastructure.