> Anthropic themselves launched Claude Design which is a pretty direct competitor to Figma in many ways. While it's nowhere near functional and polished enough to replace Figma's core design product, I expect it will get significant traction outside of that

The reaction that designers I know have given Claude Design couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for designers, their workflow is very different from software devs. You can’t “oh let Claude Design come up with a quick logo for this” in the same way that Claude Code was able to quickly solve small annoyances for devs.

People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate.

Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers.

Figma will probably better integrate AI in their own offering at some point which will help designers become more productive. And that will be the end of it.

Not sure Claude Design really competes with Figma.

While it has a strong potential to let people iterate on using a design without the nuts and bolts of going back and forth with a designer, CD operates at the "leaf-node" level, where the output is generated.

However, a lot of design has a deeper life-cycle than that. There's the collaboration, pitching, review, iteration, asset management, etc.

In fact, the first step for using CD is "onboarding", where it sucks up a design system from your existing assets/resources. It presumes you already have a design.

As it stands now, CD is one way... existing design -> task specific resources. This could be very useful, but only touches on a part of what a complete design tool does. But for iteration it's not so great. E.g. task specific concerns don't have a way to feed back to the originating design. Changes to the originating design don't have a direct path to feed back to the task specific output (e.g., when a logo or branding focus changes, or maybe just spacing guidelines are updated, the ad hoc processes around CD will have to be repeated if the changes are to actually land.)

I'd think AI design integrated with Figma is in a much better position to address these more complicated scenarios.

I doubt Claude Design even cares about these deeper scenarios, BTW -- it's intended as a leaf-node tool. Just pointing out it's not about to replace Figma or other more comprehensive design tools.

It's funny to see all of these dramatic articles coming out about Claude Design, when Google's Stitch[0] has been around for at least 6 months and no one has batted an eye. https://stitch.withgoogle.com/

I'm not sure how much of that is overhyping Claude, or Google's poor marketing of their own products.

Anthropic today feels like 1990s Microsoft, when mere rumors that MS might enter yet another software vertical (publishing, CAD, 3D etc.) were enough to destroy the stock prices of current market leaders.

> A lot of their recent product development has been to enable further expansion in organisations - "Dev Mode" for developers (which now looks incredibly quaint against LLMs), […] all are about expanding their TAM out of "pure" design.

I don't think this is correct. In my experience no one buys Figma because of Dev Mode only. Dev Mode just makes it easier/faster to go from an existing design to working code. So it is/was a means to increase Figma's moat, not to get new customers or users. (Devs already needed access to Figma before the introduction of Dev Mode.)

While a big fan of Claude's models, I am starting to worry about the "winner takes all" game starting to play out in the open. With free inference to them (as pointed out in the article), why won't Anthropic build significantly more products related to software development, and kill all other competitors? Developers first, Designers next, would some kind of a clone of Jira / Monday / Asana be next?

I think Figma is cooked. Not because they can’t eventually compete but because they’re just too slow. A company of 2500 can get outmaneuvered now by a team of 5 agentic engineers. To compete Figma would have to tear down all their internal bureaucracy ans process. Will they do that! Probably not.

And wait it gets even worse!

Why?

- Figma is sending Anthropic a bunch of training data from its own LLM assisted data. As much as Anthropic claims that it won’t use it, we all know what Amazon did with third party sellers.

- Anthropic hasn’t started to play hardball yet. Why wouldn’t they just hold back a model like Mythos (or better) while they use it to gut a few SaaS companies? It’s an easy way to increase their revenue!

Only 33% of Figma's users are designers. 30% are devs, 37% are PMs and execs. That's their growth story and now their liability. The non-designers who made Figma huge are exactly who Claude Design and friends can peel off first.

I don't have much experience with Figma but looking at their prices I'd think that for someone who isn't doing a one off designs Claude Design would be much more expensive (especially if not on subscriptions) https://www.figma.com/pricing/

> takeover attempt by Adobe, that was later blocked on competition grounds

Would Figma in Adobe be a stronger competitor against Claude Design today than Figma and Adobe can be separately?

Claude Design into PenPot via its MCP was a really neat flow, for something generic looking anyway. With the correct prompts and it even built out reusable PenPot components and design system tokens etc

Used Claude Design to build the landing page for my side project (strimoza.com) over the weekend. Honestly impressive for a solo dev with no design background — got something shippable in a few hours. That said, I still ended up going back to tweak things manually. It's great for 80%, the last 20% still needs judgment. Not sure it kills Figma for teams, but for indie devs it's a game changer.

my 2 cents - Claude is not going after EVERY single SaaS (or maybe not yet), but after those products that are adopted by individuals that are keen at experimenting new tools (software engineers, designers etc etc).

At the same time I have the feeling Claude Design is more useful to get UI context closer to Code Claude then anything (and eventually some quick prototyping), but I might be wrong.

Either way, I've been trying to upload a 95MB .fig file and I get a generic error message without any information on the issue itself (is the file too big? not the right format? Tell me!)

I’ve tried it. It’s useless.

I tested it yesterday. Kinda impressive, but also design output is pretty boring.

Great take. I think the only way forward for Figma will be the good old "let's cannibalise our own product" playbook. They are actually in prime position (with one of the best brands and distributions out there) to create an AI design product that dominates the market.

The inference provider conflict is the structural detail the article makes but the thread hasn't focused on: Figma is paying Anthropic for Sonnet 4.5 inference to power Figma Make while Claude Design runs on Opus 4.7 — that's a permanent capability ceiling for any Anthropic-dependent product, not a temporary execution gap. Traditional SaaS moats (multiplayer, design systems, plugin ecosystems) are moats against other SaaS companies. Against the company providing your inference, the only real moat is model-agnosticism, and Figma's design workflows are hard to decouple from a single provider at this stage.