- Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger resigned from Figma’s board on April 14—the same day The Information reported the company’s next model includes a competing design tool.
- The tool generates websites, landing pages, and presentations from plain English, putting it in direct competition with Figma’s estimated 80 to 90 percent market share in UI/UX design.
- Figma’s stock dipped over 2 percent on the news before recovering, while Anthropic turns away investors offering to buy in at $800 billion.
Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer and the guy who co-founded Instagram, resigned from Figma’s board on April 14. His departure was disclosed to the SEC the same day The Information reported that Anthropic’s upcoming Claude Opus 4.7 release will ship with a design tool capable of competing directly with Figma’s core product. Krieger had been on Figma’s board for less than a year.
The timing is almost comically bad optics for a board seat. Krieger joined Figma’s board in 2025 after Anthropic and Figma had been collaborating on AI integrations—Figma was using Claude to help designers build interfaces. Now Anthropic isn’t just assisting the workflow. It’s trying to replace the starting point entirely.
According to multiple outlets, the tool lets users describe a website, landing page, or presentation in plain English and the model builds it. No Figma. No Adobe. No templates. Just a prompt and a result. That’s a fundamentally different proposition from what Adobe Firefly or Figma AI offer—both of which assume a trained designer is already sitting at the keyboard.
The SaaSpocalypse Comes for Figma
Shares of Figma dropped more than 2 percent after the news broke, alongside similar dips at Adobe and Wix. The broader fear here has a name investors have been throwing around all year: the SaaSpocalypse—the idea that frontier AI labs will eventually cannibalize the software businesses they’re currently selling to. iShares’s primary software ETF, IGV, is down roughly 18 percent in 2026.
Figma commands an estimated 80 to 90 percent of the UI and UX design market. That’s an extraordinary position for any company, but it’s also an extraordinary target. If Anthropic’s tool can generate functional, editable design files from a paragraph of text, it doesn’t need to match every Figma feature. It just needs to be good enough for the thousands of teams who use Figma as a glorified whiteboard.
Figma’s stock did recover about 5 percent after the initial dip—possibly because investors remember that Anthropic and OpenAI have a track record of announcing flashy products that land with a thud in enterprise settings. Building a prototype generator is one thing. Building a collaborative design platform that Fortune 500 companies trust with their workflows is another.
But Anthropic is turning down investors offering valuations north of $800 billion, with annualized revenue reportedly hitting $30 billion and more than 1,000 enterprise customers spending over $1 million per year. That’s not a company that needs to prove it can ship. It’s a company that’s deciding which industries to walk into next.
The design tool—paired with Opus 4.7—represents Anthropic’s first real move beyond chat interfaces and developer tools into visual and creative workflows. Whether it eats Figma’s lunch or just forces a price war, one thing is clear: Mike Krieger isn’t sitting on any more boards that might become his employer’s competitors. Figma filed the SEC disclosure on April 14, and Krieger’s directorship ended that same day.
