Anthropic Launches Claude Design and Sends Figma Stock Tumbling

Anthropic on Thursday unveiled Claude Design, a new product from its experimental Anthropic Labs division that turns text prompts into polished visual work. The tool is powered by Claude Opus 4.7, Anthropic’s most capable model, and is now available in research preview for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers. Figma stock closed down 6.84 percent on the news, signaling that investors see artificial intelligence as a serious threat to established design software companies.

How Claude Design Works

Claude Design lets users describe what they want to see, and the system generates an initial version that can be refined through conversation or direct editing. During onboarding the tool reads a team’s codebase and design files to build a custom design system, which means every project automatically uses the right colors, typography, and components. Teams can maintain more than one design system for different brands or products. Users can start from a text prompt, upload documents like PowerPoint or Word files, or point Claude at existing code. The tool supports inline comments, live adjustments to spacing and layout, and exports to PDF, PowerPoint, Canva, standalone HTML, or a shareable internal URL. When a design is ready to build, Claude packages everything into a handoff bundle that developers can pass directly to Claude Code to begin writing production code.

Instagram Co-Founder Takes the Helm

The launch marks a broader push by Anthropic into workplace productivity tools. Mike Krieger, who co-founded Instagram and serves as Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer, is now leading the Labs team alongside Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann. The move follows January’s release of Claude Cowork and reflects the company’s strategy of building practical enterprise products on top of its large language model, or LLM, which is essentially the AI brain that powers all Claude products. Anthropic positions Claude Design as complementary to tools like Canva rather than a direct replacement, but the sharp market reaction suggests investors are not so sure. For companies that sell creative software, the message is clear: AI-native design tools are no longer a future concern but a present-day competitive reality that could reshape the entire industry.