Sam Blackshear, cofounder and chief technology officer of Mysten Labs, announced on August 6 that he is stepping down from the Sui developer to join Anthropic as part of its defensive security research team. According to reports from CoinDesk and Odaily News, Blackshear will remain an adviser to Mysten Labs and developers across the Sui ecosystem. Evan Cheng will assume Mysten's technical vision while continuing as the blockchain company's chief executive. Blackshear credited Cheng with recruiting many of Mysten's strongest technical employees and noted his previous leadership experience at Apple and Meta. "When I reflect on my career, I have been happiest doing hands-on technical work while exploring new problem domains," Blackshear stated. "This is an opportunity to do both, and I'm motivated to work on security at a time when the balance of power between attackers and defenders is shifting."
Blackshear's departure reflects a fundamental shift in how AI is reshaping cybersecurity, particularly in blockchain infrastructure. As reported by CoinDesk, in April, Blackshear hosted a panel with security experts about how AI coding agents are reshaping smart contract security. The turning point came when he ported a static analysis tool he built at Facebook written in OCaml-Java over to Move, the programming language used to build smart contracts on Sui. "I used Claude to make the move and flag any potential vulnerabilities, and 'it just did it,' he said. 'And then when I saw the results, I was like, 'whoa,' this is a new world that we're in terms of like the speed and the capabilities." The triage results were previously completely manual and would have taken a long time, but AI automation has dramatically accelerated this process.
Blackshear's move to Anthropic comes as the company expands research into AI-enabled cyber threats. As reported by CoinDesk, Anthropic reported in June that it studied 832 accounts linked to malicious activity and mapped their behavior across the MITRE ATT&CK framework. The company banned those accounts and found AI assistance across reconnaissance, malware development, evasion and other attack stages. Anthropic is also testing defensive uses of its models, including Project Glasswing which brought together about 50 partners to search critical software for vulnerabilities.
Many of crypto's biggest players are seeking access to powerful new AI models to strengthen their code from attacks, with many of these models, including those at Anthropic, restricted to only a small group of companies. As reported by Cointelegraph, crypto executives agree that while restricting these frontier models initially makes sense, it no longer does once competing, publicly available AI models hit the same level of cybersecurity capability. Michael Coates, Solana Foundation chief information security officer, emphasized the need for streamlined verification programs to ensure legitimate defenders have access to the best available models. "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," Coates stated.
