Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, announced his resignation from the board of the interface design firm Figma on April 14.
This departure was formally communicated to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by Figma, a publicly traded company valued at $10 billion, on the very same day that The Information reported on Anthropic’s upcoming model, Opus 4.7. This new iteration is expected to feature design tools that could directly compete with Figma’s core product offerings.
Figma is renowned for its widely adopted tool, indispensable for user experience designers crafting interfaces for websites and applications. Notably, the company has maintained a close collaborative relationship with Anthropic, integrating the frontier AI lab’s models into its products to serve as intelligent assistants for its user base.
Krieger, a distinguished figure known for co-founding Instagram and the AI-driven news application Artifact, assumed the role of Anthropic's top product executive in 2024. His tenure on Figma’s board was relatively brief, having joined less than a year prior to his resignation.
The combination of Krieger’s exit and the prospect of Anthropic's competitive design tools provides further evidence for investors concerned about a potential "SAASpocalypse"—a scenario where dominant AI laboratories could overshadow and ultimately control traditional software businesses. This hypothesis has periodically unsettled public markets throughout the year, with iShares’s primary software ETF, IGV, experiencing a decline of nearly 18% year-to-date.
Conversely, Anthropic itself appears to be thriving, reportedly declining investment offers that would value the company at $800 billion. This figure represents more than double the valuation from its most recent funding round at the beginning of the year.
However, companies like Anthropic and OpenAI still face the challenge of demonstrating that their highly capable models can genuinely replicate the specialized domain expertise and established relationships held by entrenched software brands. Interestingly, Figma’s stock price has seen a 5% increase since Krieger’s resignation was made public, though the full impact of the forthcoming Opus release remains to be seen.
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