Sam Blackshear, the creator of the Move programming language and a co-founder of Mysten Labs, said on Aug. 5 that he is leaving the Sui developer to join Anthropic for defensive AI security research. His move places one of the most closely associated engineers behind Sui’s core technology in the fast-growing field of AI-assisted software security, where automated tools are increasingly being used to identify flaws in large and aging codebases.
Blackshear spent more than eight years developing Move, from its early work at Meta through its adoption as the foundation of Sui. In announcing his departure, he said his work at Anthropic would focus on research aimed at defending software systems against security threats.
The exit comes as blockchain development activity has weakened sharply by several measures, while AI repositories, funding rounds and technical hiring have accelerated. That divergence creates a difficult security equation for crypto networks: fewer engineers may be maintaining public codebases just as AI systems make auditing code faster, cheaper and potentially more accessible to attackers as well as defenders.
Move’s path from Meta to Sui
Move was initially developed around 2018 inside Meta for Libra, the stablecoin project later renamed Diem. The language was designed to manage digital assets more safely by treating them as resources that cannot simply be copied or discarded, a technical approach intended to reduce common errors in smart-contract code.
Regulatory opposition eventually halted Diem, but Move survived as a separate codebase. Blackshear and four former Meta colleagues founded Mysten Labs in September 2021, building Sui around the language and positioning it as a network for high-throughput applications.
Blackshear’s departure does not alter the open-source status of Move or Sui’s existing technical structure. Yet it removes a developer with unusually deep familiarity with the language’s design decisions, its security model and the tools used to analyze Move-based code. That expertise is difficult to replace quickly, particularly in ecosystems where a small group of early engineers often holds much of the practical knowledge behind core infrastructure.
His own recent work illustrates why AI labs are seeking engineers with that background. During an April security roundtable, Blackshear described using Anthropic’s Claude to migrate an analysis tool he had originally built at Facebook into Move. He said the system completed the migration automatically and then scanned Move code for potential vulnerabilities, replacing work that had previously required a lengthy manual process.
AI-assisted code review can give security teams a way to inspect more software, more frequently. The same tools can also lower the cost of searching public repositories for overlooked weaknesses, placing extra pressure on projects that lack active maintainers and independent security review.
Crypto talent moves toward AI
Blackshear is among several prominent figures with crypto backgrounds who have moved into AI-focused roles or organizations.
Tomasz Stańczak, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation and founder of Ethereum client developer Nethermind, resigned from the Foundation in February after less than a year in the role. In his resignation post, Stańczak wrote that agentic systems and AI-assisted discovery were reshaping the world.
Other career changes have been more directly commercial. Alex Atallah, OpenSea’s co-founder and former chief technology officer, left the company in 2022 and later built OpenRouter, a model-aggregation platform that has been valued at $500 million. Leopold Aschenbrenner, formerly associated with the FTX Future Fund, later took responsibility for a multibillion-dollar AI investment fund. Avital Balwit, another former Future Fund colleague, became chief of staff to Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei.
These moves do not mean blockchain engineering has stopped. Major networks retain large developer communities, and technical work continues across infrastructure, scaling systems, wallets and decentralized applications. The concern is more concentrated: experienced protocol and security engineers are being drawn toward a sector offering enormous computing budgets, faster-growing teams and a dense cluster of difficult technical problems.
Repository activity has fallen while AI work expands
Artemis data cited in March showed weekly GitHub commits across crypto projects falling from roughly 850,000 in early 2025 to about 210,000, a 75% decline. Weekly active developers declined from around 8,700 to 4,600 over the same period, according to the dataset.
The pullback was uneven across networks. Artemis data showed Ethereum developer numbers down 34% over three months, while Solana developers fell 40%. BNB Chain weekly code commits dropped 85%, although commit counts can vary substantially depending on how projects organize repositories and publish updates.
GitHub’s broader platform showed the opposite pattern. Its Octoverse data recorded roughly 36 million new developers in 2025, while total commits rose 25% year over year. GitHub said AI-related activity accounted for much of the incremental growth, with more than 4.3 million AI repositories and imports of large-language-model software development kits rising 178% over one year.
The numbers suggest the shortage is not simply a matter of fewer programmers. Developers appear to be concentrating in AI, where building tools, agents and model infrastructure has become a dominant technical opportunity.
Funding follows the same direction
Venture capital is reinforcing the shift. Bloomberg reported in July that Paradigm closed a $1.2 billion fund and broadened its mandate to include AI and robotics. Framework Ventures raised $400 million for AI and robotics, while Haun Ventures raised $1 billion in May and added AI to its remit.
Crunchbase estimated that global venture investment reached $510 billion in the first half of 2026. OpenAI and Anthropic together accounted for more than 40% of that total, according to the data. Crypto-sector fundraising during the same period was below 5% of the amount invested across the broader venture market.
That allocation can affect security indirectly. Smaller funding rounds leave emerging crypto projects with less room for external audits, long-term maintenance and bug-bounty programs, even as public smart-contract and wallet code remains available for automated analysis.
A reported Coldcard hardware-wallet incident has sharpened those concerns. A firmware vulnerability disclosed on July 30 was linked to 1,196 drained wallets within 41 minutes, with losses reported above 1,082 BTC, or roughly $70 million. The flaw was said to have remained in the codebase for more than five years. A developer posting on Reddit said Claude Code identified the issue after being given the open-source code and prompted to search for vulnerabilities.
Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi wrote on social media that approximately $2 in AI computing costs could have been sufficient to uncover the weakness before exploitation. The estimate is not an assessment of the full cost of securing a hardware-wallet product, but it captures how rapidly the economics of code review are changing.
For Sui, Mysten Labs and other blockchain teams, the response will depend less on retaining every early engineer than on building durable security processes around automated testing, frequent independent audits and well-funded maintenance. Blackshear’s new role at Anthropic reflects the overlap between those worlds: the same AI systems that may expose neglected crypto code could also help developers find and fix vulnerabilities before funds are put at risk.
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