Figma's stock price went down by seven percent. Will Claude Design be the Terminator

Original title: "Anthropic to kill Figma with his own hand? "
Original author: King of the Zirin Dancers, Polar Park

From selling models to making products, Anthropic is moving faster than everyone thinks。

In 2010, a small company called Instagram was acquired by Facebook with $1 billion. A lot of people didn't understand why they spent so much on a filter app. And the story that followed -- Facebook wasn't buying a product, it was buying a species that could threaten itself and turn it into a weapon。

Mike Krieger, the co-founder who helped Instagram from zero to hundreds of millions of users. In May 2024, Mike joined the middle of the day to become the chief product officer。

On April 14, 2026, the Krieger resigned from the Figma Board. Three days later, Anthropic announced the release of Claude Design。

It's not like it's a coincidence。

In three days, the pattern of an industry changed

Figma ' s stock price dropped by more than 7 per cent that day, from $20.32 to $18.84I don't know. Market reactions are always more honest than press releases。

Claude Design is an experimental product driven by the new Anthropic flagship model Opus 4.7, an internal Anthropic Labs team. What can it do? Prototypes, slides, one page summary, and various visuals - These are exactly what designers and product managers open Figma or Canva every day。

But if you look only at Claude Design as another AI design tool, you underestimate the significance of this。

What really alerts the industry is the "crossing" mechanism between Claude Design and Claude Code。

Image from Claude Design

When you complete an interface prototype with Claude Design, the system automatically wraps the complete design specifications into a "turning package" that can be passed directly to Claude Code for further development。

More crucially, Claude Design will be able to read your code library and existing design files at the time of commissioning, and will automatically build a design system that suits your team -- fonts, colours, layout standards, brand governance rules, read at once, and follow through。

Reddit has a comment from developers that this solves the problem of using AI as the "most annoying part" of the design tool -- every new project has to re-explain your brand code with AI。

Designed for development, used to be two tools, two sets of processes, two dials. Now Anthropic wants to turn this link into a closed ring。

02 Clear strategic rhythm

If you put Claude Design in the timeline of the last few weeks, you'll see an ever-expanding Anthropic。

Early in April, Anthropic announced Claude Mythos Preview's restricted release. The model is able to detect and exploit decades of loopholes hidden in key software systems, and the security risks are so high that companies have decided not to open up to the public — instead of providing targeted access in the form of Project Glasswing to more than 50 top-level institutions such as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Morgan Chase, etc., with an additional $100 million per household, dedicated to defensive cyber security research。

On April 14, Opus 4.7 was officially released, bringing about greater coding, clearer visual understanding and a new "self-censorship" capability. Anthropic himself admits that Opus 4.7 is not as good as Mythos - but Mythos has not been made public due to security considerations。

On April 17th, CEO Dario Amodei met with White House officials on the subject of cyber security concerns caused by the Mythos model. On the same day, Claude Design was released。

Also on April 17th, foreign media reported that the Anthropic valuation had reached $80 billion, and that early IPO preliminary discussions were under way with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, and that it would be on the market in October。

This is not what a model company is doing. This is a company that is preparing to be listed and that needs to tell the capital market what "we value for" and systematically completes the product matrix。

From Claude Code disrupting the developers' tool market to Claude Design entering the design workflow, the logic of Anthropic is very clear: finding a high-frequency daily tool scene for the professional population, redoing it in the original way of AI, and using "model capabilities" as a moat, making it difficult for competitors to catch up。

03 Challenge Figma, but it also needs to face reality

However, there is often a distance between the ideal closed circle and actual use。

After a real experience with Claude Design, the evaluators found that just building a design system, building a prototype website, making a few adjustments, already consumed more than 50% of the weekly quota. Additional token costs are required after exceeding the quota. This cost pressure cannot be overlooked for the design landscape, which requires frequent overlaps。

There are also visible bugs, such as the failure to correctly read image files in the design system preview sandbox, resulting in the loss of photo links。

Claude Design is positioned at this stage more like an internal demonstration and fast prototype accelerator than a production-level design tool that can be delivered directly。

Image from Claude Design

It also means that Canva and Figma are not in vain. Figma has accumulated a moat on collaborative functions, fine management of design systems, and the work flow of professional designers for many years; the strength of Canva is the ease of use of templates for ecological and non-professional users. In the short term, the production level content still needs to be fine-tuned manually。

BUT THE WORD "SHORT TERM" IS GETTING SHORTER AND SHORTER IN THE AI FIELD。

Anthropic's real ambition this time may not be to replace Figma directly -- but to redefine "who is Figma's target user." When an independent developer, a small team product manager, an entrepreneur who needs to make a demo quickly, you can use Claude Design to build a "sufficient" prototype in a few minutes, and give it seamlessly to Claude Code, and they need time to learn Figma

That's why Figma's stock price fell by 7 percent。

04 From selling shovels to mining

There is a long parable in Silicon Valley that says that in gold heat, the most profitable is not the man who goes for gold, but the man who sells shovels. OpenAI and Anthropic played the role of selling shovels in the early days of the AI wave - providing an API to developers and businesses to build applications。

But now Anthropic is starting to mine himself。

Claude Code, Claude Design, two shovels and two entry points for user time. When Anthropic works directly as a developer and designer, it and the eco-company that used to build on its API-based products, the relationship goes from "partner" to "competent."。

This way, Microsoft passes, Google goes, Apple goes the most. The difference is that those companies have platforms before applications, and Anthropic has built trust with modelling capabilities before using it to spread to upstream applications。

Mike Krieger used to make Instagram a platform, and then watched Facebook use it to crush competitors. Two years ago, he joined Anthropic, started making products。

History does not simply repeat, but sometimes participants do。

Anthropic's IPO's most likely to land in October this year. Before thatIt's probably going to "pull" a few more times to show the capital market what it wants to be。

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