Anthropic Product Chief Exits Figma Board as New Model Threatens Design-Tool Incumbents

New updates have been reported about Anthropic.

Anthropic has moved closer to competing directly with leading design software providers after its chief product officer, Mike Krieger, resigned from the board of Figma on April 14, ahead of the expected release of Anthropic’s next model, Opus 4.7, which is reported to include native design capabilities that overlap with Figma’s core offering. The timing underscores Anthropic’s strategic shift from being an infrastructure and model provider embedded in others’ products to a potential application-layer competitor, even as it maintains existing integrations where its models act as copilots inside established design workflows.

Krieger, who joined Anthropic as top product executive in 2024 and brought deep consumer-product experience from Instagram and Artifact, had served on Figma’s board for less than a year, and his exit removes a potential governance conflict as Anthropic moves into design tooling where Figma has historically led. The development feeds into broader market fears that frontier AI labs will erode the value of traditional SaaS franchises, a concern reflected in the roughly 18% decline in a major software ETF this year, even as investors reportedly seek secondary exposure to Anthropic at valuations as high as $800 billion, more than double its early-year round, highlighting expectations that Anthropic’s higher-tier models must now prove they can match not only technical capability but also the specialized workflows and customer relationships of incumbent software vendors.