Figma stock price drops over 7%, will Claude Design become the terminator?

Title: Will Anthropic Kill Figma with Its Own Hands?
Author: Huálín Wǔwáng, Geek Park

Author: Lùdòng BlockBeats

Source:

Reprint: Mars Finance

From selling models to building products, Anthropic is moving faster than anyone expected.

In 2010, a small company called Instagram was acquired by Facebook for 1 billion dollars. At the time, many people didn’t understand why so much money was spent on a filter app. The story that followed is well known—Facebook wasn’t just buying a product, but a species that could threaten itself, and by the way, turning it into its weapon.

Mike Krieger, the co-founder who helped Instagram grow from zero to hundreds of millions of users, joined the booming Anthropic as Chief Product Officer in May 2024.

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

This time gap doesn’t seem like a coincidence.

01 In three days, an industry landscape changed

Figma’s stock price dropped more than 7% that day, from $20.32 to $18.84. Market reactions are always more honest than press releases.

Claude Design is an experimental product powered by Anthropic’s latest flagship model, Opus 4.7, developed by the internal Anthropic Labs team. What can it do? Prototypes, slides, one-page summaries, and various visual content—precisely what designers and product managers do daily when opening Figma or Canva.

But if you only see Claude Design as “another AI design tool,” you underestimate its significance.

What truly alarms industry insiders is the “handover” mechanism between Claude Design and Claude Code.

When you complete a UI prototype with Claude Design, the system automatically packages the full design specifications into a “handover bundle,” which can be directly passed to Claude Code for development.

More importantly, when activated, Claude Design reads your code repository and existing design files, automatically building a design system tailored to your team—fonts, colors, layout standards, brand governance rules—reading once and applying throughout.

Reddit developers commented that this solves the “most annoying part” of using AI for design tools—having to explain your brand standards to AI every time a new project starts.

Design to development used to involve two tools, two workflows, and two groups of people. Now, Anthropic aims to turn this chain into a closed loop.

02 Clear strategic rhythm

If you place Claude Design on the recent timeline, you’ll see an Anthropic that’s accelerating.

In early April, Anthropic announced the limited release of Claude Mythos Preview. This model can discover and exploit vulnerabilities hidden in critical software systems for decades, with such high security risks that the company decided not to open it to the public—instead, offering access to over 50 top institutions like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and J.P. Morgan Chase under “Project Glasswing,” each with a $100 million usage quota dedicated to defensive cybersecurity research.

On April 14, Opus 4.7 was officially released, bringing stronger coding capabilities, clearer visual understanding, and a new “self-check” feature. Anthropic admits that Opus 4.7’s performance isn’t as good as Mythos—yet Mythos remains unreleased due to security concerns.

On April 17, CEO Dario Amodei met with White House officials to discuss cybersecurity concerns triggered by the Mythos model. The same day, Claude Design was launched.

Also on April 17, foreign media reported that Anthropic’s valuation had reached $800 billion, and that the company was in early IPO discussions with Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley, with a potential listing as early as October this year.

This is no longer just a “model-selling company.” It’s a company preparing for an IPO, systematically filling out its product matrix to clearly communicate “why we’re worth this valuation” to the capital markets.

From Claude Code disrupting the developer tools market to Claude Design entering design workflows, Anthropic’s logic is very clear: identify high-frequency tool scenarios used by professionals daily, rebuild them with AI-native methods, and then use “model capabilities” as a moat, making it difficult for competitors to catch up.

03 Challenging Figma, but also facing reality

However, there’s often a gap between ideal closed loops and actual usage.

Some reviewers found that after experiencing Claude Design, building a design system, creating a prototype website, and making a few adjustments already consumed over 50% of their weekly quota. Once exceeding the quota, additional token fees are required. For scenarios requiring frequent iteration, this cost pressure cannot be ignored.

There are also obvious bugs, such as the design system preview sandbox failing to correctly read image files, causing image links to break.

Currently, Claude Design’s positioning is more like an internal demo and rapid prototyping accelerator rather than a production-level design tool ready for delivery.

This also means that Canva and Figma are not without countermeasures. Figma has built a moat over years in collaboration features, detailed design system management, and professional designer workflows; Canva’s strength lies in its template ecosystem and ease of use for non-professionals. In the short term, production-grade content still requires manual fine-tuning.

But “short-term,” in the AI field, is becoming increasingly shorter.

Anthropic’s real ambition this time may not be directly replacing Figma—but redefining “who the target users of Figma are.” When an independent developer, a small team’s product manager, or a startup founder needing to quickly produce a demo can use Claude Design to build a “good enough” prototype in minutes, then seamlessly hand it over to Claude Code for implementation, do they still need to spend time learning Figma?

That’s the real reason Figma’s stock dropped 7%.

04 From selling shovels to mining

There’s a long-standing metaphor in Silicon Valley: during the gold rush, the most profitable weren’t the gold miners but the shovel sellers. OpenAI and Anthropic, in the early AI wave, played the role of “shovel sellers”—providing APIs for developers and enterprises to build applications.

But now, Anthropic is starting to mine itself.

Claude Code and Claude Design are two shovels, and also two entry points that capture user time. When Anthropic directly develops developer and design tools, its relationship with ecosystem companies that built products based on its APIs shifts from “partner” to “competitor.”

This path has been trodden by Microsoft, Google, and Apple—though the difference is that those companies first built platforms and then applications, while Anthropic first establishes trust through model capabilities and then extends upward into application layers.

Mike Krieger built Instagram into a platform, then watched Facebook leverage that platform to crush competitors. Two years ago, he joined Anthropic to develop products.

History doesn’t simply repeat, but sometimes participants do.

Anthropic’s IPO could happen as early as October this year. Before that, it will likely “release” a few more times, letting the capital market see clearly what kind of company it aims to become.