Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, resigned from the board of interface design company Figma on April 14, following reports that Anthropic’s upcoming AI model, Opus 4.7, will include design tools potentially competing with Figma’s core offering.
Figma, a publicly traded company valued at $10 billion, disclosed Krieger's departure to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on the same day The Information reported on Opus 4.7's competitive features. This development suggests a direct challenge to Figma's primary market.
Figma is renowned for its popular user experience design tool for web and app interfaces. Notably, the company has previously collaborated closely with Anthropic, integrating the AI lab's models into its products as user assistants.
Krieger, a co-founder of Instagram and the AI-powered news app Artifact, assumed his role as Anthropic's top product executive in 2024 and had joined Figma's board less than a year prior.
His resignation and the anticipated launch of Anthropic's design tools add to investor concerns regarding the "SaaSpocalypse" thesis – the fear that major AI labs will increasingly dominate established software businesses. This sentiment has impacted public markets, with iShares’s primary software ETF (IGV) experiencing a nearly 18% decline this year.
Concurrently, Anthropic is reportedly declining investors seeking to buy into the company at an $800 billion valuation, more than double its most recent round earlier this year.
Despite these high valuations, AI pioneers like Anthropic and OpenAI still face the challenge of proving their advanced models can truly replicate the specialized domain experience and user relationships cultivated by established software brands. While Figma’s stock rose 5% after Krieger’s departure was announced, the full impact of the upcoming Opus release remains to be seen.