Design enters its frenemies era

FastCompany: It was the shock that the design world didn’t see coming, but should have. In mid-April, Anthropic, the maker of Claude, launched a stand-alone design tool called Claude Design . No matter that Google had already tried the same thing with its platform Stitch, and there were also plenty of perfectly good vibe coding tools on the market. The possibility that Anthropic—the same AI company known for upending product development by rapidly commoditizing code —was coming for design next introduced a sudden urgency into the conversation around design tools and automation. Friends suddenly looked a lot more like competitors.

Designer-influencers reacted in hyperbolic doomerism . Investors concurred that Claude’s aspirations spelled danger for design tools, and Figma’s stock dropped approximately 7% the day of the announcement, while Adobe’s was knocked down by around 2.5% . That’s the way competition works in any industry. But in this case, Figma and Adobe (alongside Canva, which is privately owned) are all long-standing partners with Anthropic. I connected with the three design companies following the news. For the most part, even Anthropic’s own partners in the design tool world seemed surprised by the announcement.

And I can say with certainty that the acting product design teams at Figma and Adobe had no idea that a competitive product from Anthropic was about to drop. While this is all just business, the announcement underscored what has been increasingly clear for a while now: Design—as judged by the tools its practitioners use, at least—is in a messy moment where it can feel like design is eating itself. Why everybody collabs with Anthropic This particular moment was so surprising to the design tools industry because, for the most part, new AI frontier model companies have been playing nicely with incumbents.

Figma (like Adobe and Canva) has been operating under a multiyear collaboration with Anthropic to integrate Claude into Figma and Figma into Claude. Yes, it’s a strangely interdependent relationship. Design tools need the best frontier models to power their software. And yet, they also want to appear as part of those models , not only to attract new users but to remain relevant in a world where people increasingly work within an AI feed. A capture from an Anthropic demo of Claude Design.

[Image: Anthropic] Despite this collaboration, Anthropic’s sudden announcement of a rich graphical user interface (GUI) editing tool seems to have gone a step beyond anything that Anthropic had disclosed to Figma was in the works. A few days before the announcement dropped, Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, stepped down from Figma’s board. As Figma’s cofounder Dylan Field put it (with a wink to Sam Altman’s firing from OpenAI ): “They were not consistently candid in their communications,” according to a report on Upstarts Media .

I got a similar impression during a background call with Adobe, in which the company reiterated that it has had an excellent, long-term relationship with Anthropic, and it recently collaborated on integrating Adobe workflows into Anthropic’s large language model (LLM). However, I also concluded that the news of Claude Design had arrived with very little notice. There was enough polite talking around my specific follow-ups that I suspect that Adobe got the same fuzzy-facts presentation about what Claude Design actually constituted that was given to Figma.

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The article discusses a significant shift in the design tools landscape due to AI advancements, which is highly relevant and impactful for brand strategy professionals navigating this evolving competitive environment.